Can we store link to commit which deleted a port?

[mojca]

When someone is looking for a particular (deleted) port, there might be a great chance that this person actually wants to install the port that everyone else thought was useless, or at least broken beyond repair. Maybe that person is even wiling to look into fixing the old Portfile.

What we are missing in MacPorts is precisely the way to easily find old deleted ports, and to find reasons why they were deleted. We have almost all functionality in place now to allow us to store the commit shasum in which the port was deleted, so we could provide URL to the commit on github, which would hopefully include the commit message explaining why the port was deleted, potentially also showing the link to the pull request with the relevant discussion. And more importantly, it would be easy to see what the contents of the old port were.

What do you think about adding either an additional column (or maybe an additional table since the number of entries is expected to be relatively low) listing (port_name, commit, <timestamp?>) for deleted ports?

As an example the port maven-ant-tasks could link to macports/macports-ports@493ec90.

Arjun already pointed out some potential issues with the approach I had in mind, but I wanted to open this as an issue to leave some room for brainstorming.

Originally posted by @mojca in https://github.com/macports/macports-webapp/pull/103/files

[arjunsalyan]

Adding more comments related to deleted ports, I can create a new issue if this is the not the right place.

1. Shall we show deleted ports in the search results by default?
2. Shall we count them while counting ports under a category, maintainer, variant etc. ?

[pmetzger]

I'd suggest making it easy to find deleted ports, but not showing them by default. Maybe a checkbox.

[mojca]

I would say that the answer to both questions should be "NO".

While deleted ports still exist in the database, they should not in reality belong to any particular category, maintainer or variant (no need to remove that data from the database, but I would not show deleted ports when searching for ports belonging to a particular maintainer).

That said, we could have a completely separate search for deleted ports, but I would put that somewhere low on priority list. I don't see a good reason to show deleted ports anywhere, except, maybe, on the main page when searching for ports without any filter, but even then it would have to be at the end of the list, and clearly marked as deleted. Deleted ports might be nice for the information in case anyone is searching for a particular piece of software, serving as a hint that it was once present. But nothing more than that.

[mascguy]

While this sounds great in principle, tracking deleted ports indefinitely isn't ideal either. Has there been any thought/discussion, related to purging that info? My vote would be that we remove one year after deletion.

Though I'd be fine with not purging, if we no longer show them within various areas of the UI. Per issue: 283 - Deleted ports: don't show livecheck; change option "hide deleted" to "show deleted"

Thoughts?