Request to revive a port?

[Brett Glass]

For many years, I've been installing a simple EMACS-like editor,
rather than the bloated (and GPLed) GNU EMACS, on FreeBSD systems I
create. It's extremely handy for those of us who, for decades, have
been used to the EMACS keystrokes and commands. But between FreeBSD
14.0 and 14.1, it seems to have dropped out of the port and package
collections. It's very simple and stable code, so while it
generates a few compiler warnings under the latest CLANG (which
could be easily fixed; they mainly have to do with function
prototypes) it still does compile and run perfectly. How can I
request that it be reinstated?

--Brett Glass

[Dan Mahoney (Ports)]

> On Jun 4, 2024, at 23:59, Brett Glass <br...@lariat.net> wrote:
>
> For many years, I've been installing a simple EMACS-like editor, rather than the bloated (and GPLed) GNU EMACS, on FreeBSD systems I create. It's extremely handy for those of us who, for decades, have been used to the EMACS keystrokes and commands. But between FreeBSD 14.0 and 14.1, it seems to have dropped out of the port and package collections. It's very simple and stable code, so while it generates a few compiler warnings under the latest CLANG (which could be easily fixed; they mainly have to do with function prototypes) it still does compile and run perfectly. How can I request that it be reinstated?

Is it me or did you fully neglect to mention the name of the port here? Could you share that?

-Dan

[Brett Glass]

The name of the port is "jove" - short for "JOn's Version of
EMACS." One of the simplest and yet most capable editors that uses
the EMACS keystrokes.

--Brett Glass

[Olivier]

>> between FreeBSD 14.0 and 14.1, it seems to have dropped out of
>> the port and package collections. It's very simple and stable

Ports are not really linked to a version of FreeBSD, I cannot find Jove
on a 13.3 machine I have either.

It may be because there was no active maintener anymore, I see that jove
is maintained by po...@freebsd.org, so no specific person in charge.

Best regards,

Olivier

[Reshad Patuck]

I had a look at the FreeBSD-ports repository history and it looks like the Jove port expired in January this year.

editors/jove||2024-01-18|Has expired: No upstream update in last 23 years

The upstream for this port is https://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/moraes/jove/ARCHIVE/4.16/ with the latest files from 1996.

That said there seems to be a github project which seems to be maintained https://github.com/jonmacs/jove and it looks like the debian package uses this.

I can try my hand at creating a port for this over the weekend if that would be helpful.

Best,

Reshad

[Dan Mahoney (Ports)]

According to freshports (https://www.freshports.org/editors/jove) it was removed because there had been no update from upstream in 23 years.

Perhaps the port should be revived to use this github version which seems to show active development:

https://github.com/jonmacs/jove

It looks like vixie was the one who moved it to github — I would suggest giving a try to creating a new port for this version, and submitting it.  If this is something you find useful, it might be a reasonable port to take maintainership of.

-Dan

[Dan Mahoney (Ports)]

Jinx :)

[Jan Beich]

May I suggest to switch to editors/mg. It has more permissive license,
/rescue version (mg-static flavor) and actively maintained on OpenBSD.

Both jove and mg lack syntax highlighting, Lisp in startup scripts and
Unicode support. However, jove supports lisp-mode unlike mg.

[Brett Glass]

That would be fantastic! According to the article at

https://opensource.com/article/20/3/lightweight-emacs

(near the end), there is a jove 4.17.06-9. The code has been very stable for decades, though, so the newer version may add features rather than fixing bugs.

--Brett Glass

[andrew clarke]

On 2024-06-05 17:19:00, Jan Beich (jbe...@FreeBSD.org) wrote:

> May I suggest to switch to editors/mg. It has more permissive license,
> /rescue version (mg-static flavor) and actively maintained on OpenBSD.
>
> Both jove and mg lack syntax highlighting, Lisp in startup scripts and
> Unicode support. However, jove supports lisp-mode unlike mg.

There is also Jed (editors/jed) and jmacs (from editors/joe). Both support
syntax highlighting and Unicode. I used both years ago where I'd switch
between them depending on what I was editing.

These days I mostly use editors/micro. It doesn't use emacs key bindings by
default but it may be possible to change that:

https://github.com/zyedidia/micro/issues/643

[andrew clarke]

On 2024-06-05 10:35:34, Reshad Patuck (reshad...@gmail.com) wrote:

> I had a look at the FreeBSD-ports repository history and it looks like the
> Jove port expired in January this year.
> editors/jove||2024-01-18|Has expired: No upstream update in last 23 years
> The upstream for this port is
> https://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/moraes/jove/ARCHIVE/4.16/ with the latest
> files from 1996.

This seems a bit abitrary and unfair since MicroEMACS 4.0 (editors/uemacs)
remains in Ports despite upstream not being updated since 1996-04-22.

I uploaded the source to GitHub a few years ago as the maintainer of the
FreeBSD port. Maybe moving it to GitHub was enough to keep the
DeletionMonster(tm) away. Or maybe it was just overlooked. A mystery for
the ages.

I don't really use MicroEMACS myself any more but I believe there are still
some FreeBSD users that do, so I'd prefer it wasn't deleted solely because
it's unmaintained. (If I was being really petty and stubborn I could fork
the source, change one byte and claim it was maintained again!)

In time there will be a lot more unmaintained open source software. Age
alone can't be enough to remove something from Ports. A good example is
archives/zip which hasn't seen an update since 2008.

PS. I've just discovered there's now a fork of the newer MicroEMACS 5.0
which has been patched to run under FreeBSD:

git clone https://github.com/JoachimSchneider/MicroEmacs
cd MicroEmacs/ue500/freebsd/termcap
make
/emacs