Lots of pkg project no longer maintained messages

[vukodlak]

Is it just me or does there seem to be a lot more of "package has no maintainer" warnings lately?

 

[diizzy]

There's a lot of abandoned ports (including upstream), ongoing discussions whether the ports tree is a software museum or not and with all that entails including security concerns. On top of that new ports keeps getting added with very little to no pruning so you're likely seeing a bit more than before especially if you're using non maintained projects upstream.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGmuZz5ETHs&t=19276s
Will give you a bit better insight (audio is missing the first 30 secs)

 

[mer]

pkg query -a '%n %m' lists the maintainer of all installed packages.
If they have no maintainer, who is listed as maintainer? Is it ports@FreeBSD.org? if so, then add a "| grep "ports@FreeBSD.org" at the end of the pkg query command.

 

[Alain De Vos]

One can always "adopt". But i lack & intelligence & knowledge of C & knowledge of shell scripting & knowledge of porters handbook.
But right, this works on volunteers, no pay-check.

 

[Ole]

There's a lot of abandoned ports (including upstream)

It is important to distinguish between a package being "unmaintained" and the "software museum" concept often discussed among committers.
An unmaintained port simply means there is currently no designated individual responsible for its oversight. However, anyone can still submit patches—similar to the NetBSD ports system—and any contributor is welcome to step up as the new maintainer to resolve issues.
The "software museum" argument, which suggests removing older ports, represents just one perspective. Many users believe that a port remains valuable even if it hasn't been updated recently, as a lack of recent updates doesn't necessarily mean the software is broken or useless to the community.

 

[Alain De Vos]

Dying here,
pkg query -e '%m=ports@FreeBSD.org' %o | sort

astro/rmap
astro/sunclock
astro/xplanet
audio/alsa-plugins
audio/cd-discid
audio/gsm
audio/mp3burn
audio/opusfile
databases/db5
databases/libdbi
databases/libdbi-drivers
devel/boehm-gc
devel/boehm-gc-threaded
devel/gamin
devel/gprbuild
devel/jech-dht
devel/libgee
graphics/aalib
graphics/egl-wayland
lang/fsharp
lang/mono
lang/mono-basic
lang/mono5.20
math/py-kiwisolver
multimedia/atomicparsley
multimedia/baka-mplayer
multimedia/libdvdcss
multimedia/libxine
multimedia/xine
net/nc
print/gsfonts
print/libraqm
security/mhash
security/unix-selfauth-helper
sysutils/bsdconfig
sysutils/dvd+rw-tools
sysutils/eject
sysutils/gsmartcontrol
sysutils/setsid
textproc/iso8879
textproc/libepubgen
textproc/libqxp
textproc/libtre
textproc/scim
textproc/source-highlight
textproc/xmlada
x11-fonts/font-awesome
x11-fonts/ibmfonts
x11-fonts/plex-ttf
x11-themes/adwaita-qt5
x11-themes/la-capitaine-icon-theme
x11-toolkits/libunique3
x11-wm/awesome
x11-wm/echinus
x11/fbpanel
x11/keybinder
x11/keybinder-gtk3
x11/lavalauncher
x11/lxmenu-data
x11/plank
x11/sandbar
x11/sirula

 

[diizzy]

It is important to distinguish between a package being "unmaintained" and the "software museum" concept often discussed among committers.
An unmaintained port simply means there is currently no designated individual responsible for its oversight. However, anyone can still submit patches—similar to the NetBSD ports system—and any contributor is welcome to step up as the new maintainer to resolve issues.
The "software museum" argument, which suggests removing older ports, represents just one perspective. Many users believe that a port remains valuable even if it hasn't been updated recently, as a lack of recent updates doesn't necessarily mean the software is broken or useless to the community.

Yes, not everything that's unmaintained is really unmaintained (in tree).

If you look at the bigger picture and realize that you have a handful of ports requiring legacy dependencies that are unmaintained, fails to build with newer reverse dependencies, fails to build with newer compilers etc and all of course can't co-exist which no one will fully or even partially resolve not the mention the additional amount of manpower (which doesn't exist) required to actually make sure that everything doesn't break (maintain it all). Repeat that for lets say 300+ libraries / reverse dependencies and it's suddely a whole different beast than one or two ports. Keep in mind that unmaintained software also is _much_ harder to keep track of, a recent example is archivers/zip. Add understaffed and most volunteers unpaid on top of that and you have your equation.

This is why you have repos migration away from (insert unmaintained library/depency upstream here),be it GTK 2, PCRE(1), SDL(1) etc.