thunderbird-x11 port deletion

[Ionic (Mihai Moldovan)]

We should assess the user basis of thunderbird-x11 and remove the port, as it is highly outdated, unmaintained and depends on deprecated software like gnome-vfs.

People are most likely using the official, maintained and recent Cocoa Thunderbird version provided by Mozilla.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

I'd like to keep it on the condition that it gets updated.

[larryv (Lawrence Velázquez)]

Replying to egall@…:

I'd like to keep it on the condition that it gets updated.

Uhm, what? The whole point of this ticket is that this port never gets updated.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Replying to larryv@…:

Replying to egall@…:

I'd like to keep it on the condition that it gets updated.

Uhm, what? The whole point of this ticket is that this port never gets updated.

Yeah, I agree that it's an issue that the port never gets updated, but assuming that that's the problem, the conclusion I'd draw would be that someone should just finally get around to actually updating the port, not that it should be deleted entirely.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Cc Me!

[larryv (Lawrence Velázquez)]

Replying to egall@…:

Yeah, I agree that it's an issue that the port never gets updated, but assuming that that's the problem, the conclusion I'd draw would be that someone should just finally get around to actually updating the port, not that it should be deleted entirely.

Since it was created five years ago, this port has seen all of six commits and seven tickets since it was created. Precisely one of those commits has been a version bump. The problem is not that this port (and firefox-x11 and firefox-x11-devel) happens to be horrendously outdated; the problem is that no one cares about it. This is fine for trivial Python and Perl modules that take little effort to update, but not for a large and involved port like this one, which will in all likelihood always be horrendously outdated.

If you want to submit an update patch or assume maintainership, that would be fine and good. Otherwise, it’s rather insolent of you to flippantly assert that “someone” should waste their free time fixing a port that neither they nor anyone else gives a fig about.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Well sorry if I offended you; I was just stating my preference. Anyway I'll work on a patch once I get #39032 sorted out, as somehow libnotify gets dragged in as one of thunderbird's dependencies...

[afb@…]

Once upon a time, the ports (like firefox and thunderbird) were added as part of the applications available for running in a X11 desktop environment on Mac OS X and PureDarwin (such as Xfce*). Having Cocoa versions didn't really help, and either way there were very few interested in building even those from source - as most would just run with the binaries from Mozilla or never switch their browser. So it all depends on who the target audience is, whether they care about alternative desktop environments and about (building from) open source or not. For most users, it's much easier to run FreeBSD in a virtual machine than trying to get such a Darwin environment running again... I suppose you could just ask PureDarwin.org to support their own ports, if you want to want to be MacPorts first and foremost ?

• wiki:Xfce (also #31203)

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Well considering I'm interested in helping the PureDarwin project come back to life, I'd prefer to continue to try to support them...

[neverpanic (Clemens Lang)]

Deleted in r115718. We can always bring the port back if somebody wants to come up with a patch. In its current state, the port is doing more harm than good.