How to construct this port?

[Chuck Swiger]

Ion-Mihai IOnut Tetcu wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 12:53:34 -0500
> Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
>> However, sometimes mail systems go down or block traffic for whatever
>> reason: postmaster's job is a thankless task, and this was true even
>> before spam and viral email appeared.  Nowadays, it's harder to get
>> things mostly right (nevermind "perfect"), so postmasters make
>> imperfect decisions because they are faced with undesirable tradeoffs.
> 
> Indeed :-(
> 
> However banning a hole country isn't a tradeoff in my book, it's just
> plain [inset_the_word_here]. And sin[c]e it's giving a 5XX code there's
> really no way to reach the person in question.

I agree that blocking a whole country is a mistake.  Short of posting to the 
mailing list, there's no way to reach whoever it is.

Although I've CC:ed him on the thread.

>> It has not been my observation that insisting people not make any
>> mistakes commonly results in fewer mistakes being made, or much less,
>> in zero mistakes being made.  :-)  Rather than try to insist they
>> "are not allowed" to do something, I'd prefer to let people make
>> their own decisions and learn which ones are mistakes.  YMMV....
> 
> The problem is that, IMHO, this kind of rejecting affects us all as I
> think that being a port maintainer implies receiving and replying to
> users' email.

Certainly true.

People doing stuff with FreeBSD ought to whitelist @freebsd.org in particular; 
that would make committers lives easier.  But email and even Internet access 
are not completely reliable; people go away on vacations sometimes, for a 
timely example.  (Merry Christmas/holidays all.  :-)

For a maintainer timeout to be useful, there needs to be a pending PR and/or 
someone else willing to be more accessible.  Update the current PR with the 
bounce and set responsible to Nivo, committing the change or not as you feel 
best; or file a new PR listing another maintainer if one is available and wait 
for the standard timeout period pending resolution by the hat-wearing demigods 
known as portmgr at .

-- 
-Chuck