status of FreeBSD ports you maintain as of 20090705

[Charlie Kester]

On Tue 04 Aug 2009 at 09:21:07 PDT Diego Depaoli wrote:
>2009/8/4 Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org>:
>> Diego Depaoli wrote:
>>> There are too many ports and too few people who care them.
>>> IMHO the options are:
>>> - decrease the number of ports
>> We trim dead/useless ports all the time.
>>> - increase the number of  volunteers/committers/testers...
>> This is the only valid answer for FreeBSD.
>How? I think your following comment (even smiled) isn't the right
>starting point.
>
>>> - switch to a multi-level solution (e.g. Archlinux).
>> In DiegoBSD you should feel free to use any solution you think is
>> useful. :)
>Please look at
>http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/134443
>Ok, I agree,  is an useless port, but 3 months without further notices
>are enough to demotivate any volunteer.

I've been a maintainer since the beginning of this year, and I've yet to
have any of my updates go unnoticed for that long.  I suspect that your
PR is the exception rather than the rule.

But it does suggest the need for more guidance on how maintainers can
work effectively with the committers.  What can we do to help streamline
the process? What sort of things create extra, unnecessary work for
committers? 

If a PR doesn't get picked up within a week, it doesn't seem to be
showing up on the committers' scans when they're looking for something
to do.  Perhaps they should fix their scans, but perhaps the maintainer
should post a message here, asking for someone to look at the PR?  I've
seen messages like that in the past, and the response has always been
that one of the committers volunteers to take care of it.