Bug 284071

Summary:	UPDATING has references to parts of UPDATING that were trimmed
Product:	Ports & Packages	Reporter:	Terry Kennedy <terry-freebsd>
Component:	Individual Port(s)	Assignee:	Rene Ladan <rene>
Status:	New ---
Severity:	Affects Many People	CC:	rene, terry-freebsd
Priority:	---
Version:	Latest
Hardware:	Any
OS:	Any

Description Terry Kennedy 2025-01-15 04:49:29 UTC

/usr/ports/UPDATING on 14.2-STABLE has entries such as:

20230315:
  AFFECTS: users of lang/ruby30
  AUTHOR: yasu@FreeBSD.org

  The default ruby version has been updated from 3.0 to 3.1.
[...]
  If you do not use pkg, please check entry 20190420.
  The description there should also work for this version.

[Note: Duplicate of 277370 which was filed nearly a year ago but is still unassigned.]

There are several of these in there (based on 'grep " entry" /usr/ports/UPDATING' and there are likely more that don't conform to the "entry" format.

Unfortunately, /usr/ports/UPDATING has been trimmed so that the oldest entry is 20210113, leaving these as references to material that is no longer included in UPDATING.

I don't know if there's a way to easily automate the detection of dangling references whenever UPDATING is trimmed, or for future changes to UPDATING to avoid referencing entries that no longer exist.

In the meantime, I suggest adding something like this to the bottom of UPDATING:

--- Entries below this line are retained because they are still referenced ---

and then selectively including all of the dangling references. In a quick look at the grep results, these are 20190420, 20190829, 20200811.

Note that this is a proactive PR (at least as far as new FreeBSD 14 installs go) as none of the ports with dangling references have been updated yet. However, given that the ports in question are ruby*, postgresql* and *-emacs2x-* it is likely that at least one of them will be updated during the nearly four years remaining in FreeBSD 14 support.