Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 20:52:39 -0400 From: "Matthew Emmerton" <matt@gsicomp.on.ca> To: <freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Port Maintainers Message-ID: <002d01c0210a$beca4350$1200a8c0@zircon>
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For some time now I've seen many requests come to the ports mailing list which really should be handled by the maintainers of individual ports, not the people who look after committing PRs. As usual, the standard response is "contact the port maintainer". At first I wondered whether it was simply inexperience or ignorance that caused people to turn to the ports list for assistance, but over the last few months, I'm beginning to think whether the problem lies on the other side of the equation with the maintainers themselves. Not to pick on maintainers (since I maintain a few low-traffic ports myself and realize the volume of mail that can result), but I've sent mails to the maintainers of some pretty important ports (db-2.77, cyrus, apache13-fp for starters) and was not impressed with the results. In most cases I simply never received an answer to my emails, and in few rare occurences, received an answer after about a month's time -- usually by that time a new release had emerged or the problem that I was seeing had been overcome. What I'm wondering if is there is any mechanism in place to ensure that the support channel (e-mail to the port maintainer) remains open and valid. I know that at least one port for which the maintainer's email address bounces mail. There may also be some ports for which the designated maintainers simply don't maintain the port anymore. It would be advantageous to all if a periodic validation of these contact points could be performed (once per RELEASE would seem like a logical period to me.) Any thoughts? -- Matthew Emmerton GSI Computer Services +1 (800) 217-5409 (Canada) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message
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