Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 21:32:05 -0500 From: linimon@lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) To: "Liam J. Foy" <liamfoy@sepulcrum.org> Cc: freebsd-ports-bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: ports/96109: [update] audio/gtick Message-ID: <20060424023205.GA2501@soaustin.net> In-Reply-To: <200604201750.k3KHoRbY080788@freefall.freebsd.org> References: <200604201750.k3KHoRbY080788@freefall.freebsd.org>
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On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 05:50:27PM +0000, Liam J. Foy wrote: > It looks ok from a first glance, yes. I don't bother too much with ports > now but it looks reasonable :) I don't want to pick on the OP in particular, but I do want to address a general issue here. The idea of the "maintainer" system in ports is to attempt to assign individual ports to someone who will actively work with the port to upgrade versions, answer user questions, and solve problems that come up due to changes in the infrastructure. In the best of all possible worlds, we would like to have maintainers who are actively using the software in question. In particular, although we hold _committers_ responsible for doing testing so that they make commits that "do good but at least do no harm", the more that _maintainers_ can help the committers out with this, the faster we can get updates and fixes in. As the number of ports continues to rapidly increase, (and thus, we fall behind in the PR backlog), this becomes more and more important. I'd like to ask maintainers who are not able to make those kinds of commitments to please consider returning the ports to the general pool. In this way, if someone else sends a PR with a fix or an update, it won't have to wait until a maintainer who has lost interest in the port reviews it (or it times out after 2 weeks). Having a port in this state also may tend to discourage anyone else who is actively using the port from adopting it. One of the continual complaints that we hear as portmgr is that "maintainer foo is not answering my emails about port bar." This isn't a situation that is good for FreeBSD, IMHO. In the above-posited perfect world, we would have a maintainer assigned to every port, instead of having 4400+ with no assignment. But having a maintainer who is not actively working on their ports may be a worse situation than that, because it gives the impression that something is being maintained when it really isn't. The new policy "no new ports accepted without a maintainer" is meant to try to fight the increasing number (percentagewise, and all-time high of over 30%) of unmaintained ports. It has barely slowed down the rate of increase in the Ports Collection. But the number of ports not being actively maintained is much harder to gague than that. However, I can tell you (since one of my self-adopted tasks is to try to reset maintainers who have vanished) that the number is pretty large. The goal here is to avoid having a Ports Collection full of halfway- maintained or fully-unmaintained ports. I hope that everyone can agree that this goal is desireable. But it's really going to require everyone's help to keep us from heading ever more towards that direction. mcl
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