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

[Mark Linimon]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 10:40:11AM -0500, Paul Schmehl wrote:
> Write a script that parses the submit dates.  After an agreed upon amount 
> of time with no action (6 months?  A year?) the PR gets automatically nuked 
> and the original submitter gets an email message - Dear John, we're sorry, 
> but nothing was done to correct the problem you submitted in prxxxxx. 
> (Copy of the original PR attached.)  If this problem remains unresolved and 
> needs to be resolved, please resubmit under a new PR.

My experience with closing the stale kern/ PRs is that submitters really
hate it when we do this.

The thing I try to encourage people to do is set PRs to feedback and ask
"is this still a problem?"  If yes, change it to either open (if there
is something like a patch or suggested solution) or suspended (no solution
is known.)  (Of course, if there is no response after some time, it can
be closed with a "feedback timeout".)

Submitters really don't want to hear that we just gave up on a problem
that they obviously took the time to write us about.  The impression
they get from something like this is "FreeBSD doesn't care, I'll just
go elsewhere."

I have plenty of experience trying to close old, stale, PRs to back up
this assertion.

(There is also the problem of "some agreed-upon time".  As you are no
doubt learning, getting that "agreed-upon" part down is where the
majority of these ideas fall apart.  I have uncommitted patches to the
PR handling guidelines about this; uncommitted because I couldn't get
a consensus about it.)

mcl