New port with maintainer ports@FreeBSD.org [was: Question about maintainers]

Mark Linimon linimon at lonesome.com
Fri Jul 29 20:33:25 GMT 2005


On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 12:21:58PM +0200, Roman Neuhauser wrote:
>  # mi+mx at aldan.algebra.com / 2005-03-22 15:57:42 -0500:
>  > Roman, why would not you be the maintainer?
>  
>  Ok, sign me up.
>  
>  /me sighs
> 
> I had had a reply written saying that I'd simply be a very bad
> maintainer for the port (for the above mentioned reasons), but the
> thought of the ping pong ("why not?", "c'mon, you can do it!", etc
> [hyperbole, but that's what you guys do, and it's not pleasant])
> wasn't too attractive, so I bowed.

Then it looks to me like you made a mistake by so doing. If you didn't
want your arm to be twisted, you should have said so then.

> So, what do we have here? Am I the maintainer? What does that
> actually mean anyway?

My view is that if someone says they'll maintain a port, then they
shouldn't be surprised if people look to them to update it, fix it if
it breaks, and answer questions from users.  If they don't want to do
any of that, that's ok, but they shouldn't volunteer to be the maintainer.

> because I don't see a practical difference besides the value of
> MAINTAINER

If the maintainer is inactive, there isn't one.  But we want to encourage
more people to be active maintainers.

> You know, talking to you as the portmgr team member, you do have
> a problem with port maintainership handling, but it's a different
> one from "too many ports at FreeBSD.org ports".

Most ports with maintainers are in better shape than the ports without
maintainers.  I can't demonstrate this statistically at this time but
the last time I generated hacky statistics it was certainly the case.
The fact that we have a number of maintainers who are inactive is a
problem but it's not the same problem.

> Ying-Chieh's patch nicely brings forth the other side of the story:
> he/she hadn't created the port him-/herself, but updating it to a
> newer version was easy enough.

And it's great when that happens, but since the number of unmaintained
ports is growing far faster than the number of maintainers and committers,
the number of ports where this isn't happening is going to grow.

> From where I'm standing, bringing the port in (even "unmaintained")
> looks like a win.

Then we're going to have to agree to disagree.

mcl


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