Thanks very much for the question. When I was putting this post together, my goal was to raise awareness of how many and how many different kinds of unmaintained ports there are. Admittedly, I could have chosen some other ports for the sample column above, but most of the ones I listed have pending upstream package updates according to the portscout page, e.g. Coin.

The diffutils port is one of the exceptions in that, as you noted, the upstream package has not changed for years, so there’s not necessarily any reason to adopt the FreeBSD port. I included it because it’s well-known and might spark some interest in finding out what else is in the tree that does need updating.

Cheers,
Greg

Now that the comment functionality is fixed, I can repeat what I wanted to write yesterday

I was wondering why you make so much effort to find out which ports are “orphaned”. I mean for some of them, there isn’t anything to maintain from a user’s perspective, because they are rock-solid and have been used as is for years. Take the diffutils. I wouldn’t want anyone to mess with the “diff” command. And I’m sure that all the developers and sysadmins out there, who use it, are happy to leave it untouched, because it just works. In fact, the GNU diffutils haven’t been touched by anyone for seven years! http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/diffutils/

Cheers
Carsten