Hi everyone,

To prepare for the upcoming inaugural International FreeBSD Adopt-A-Port Day on June 15th, 2009, I am publishing some interesting (???) statistics about the FreeBSD ports tree.

First up (cue the violins): The most unloved FreeBSD port!

This port has been a workhorse since the year 1996, back in the days before the Internet you now know, when a fast connection was 56k and we often disabled image loading in our browsers to speed up the browser! Those days, there were fewer than 500 ports in the tree, a far cry from the 20,000+ we now enjoy.

And now, I give you (drumroll, please)….

print/ghostview

The CVS log shows that this port has been unmaintained since 17-Nov-96, so it’s been nearly 13 years that ghostview has been wandering aimlessly through the tree, waiting for someone to adopt her/him/it. The ghostview port won’t require a lot of care and feeding, but if a new upstream version is released, the port would like a FreeBSD maintainer that will submit a PR to keep it in sync.

So, wouldn’t you like to help a port regain its standing in the tree and become all that it can be and more? Contact me at glarkin@FreeBSD.org to get involved and help out!

Keep in touch,
Greg
SourceHosting.net, LLC