status of FreeBSD ports you maintain as of 20090705

[Alex Goncharov]

,--- You/Mark (Tue, 4 Aug 2009 14:54:42 -0500) ----*
| On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 11:55:19AM -0400, Alex Goncharov wrote:
| > Wouldn't it be better for everybody if more people could commit the
| > changes in their ports themselves?  (Subject to a commit-privilege
| > revocation on a substantial breakage anyplace).
| 
| IMHO: no.  Too many people automatically update their ports on a regular
| basis, and rely on us to not introduce brokenness.  Having updates
| filtered through people that have shown themselves to having had a good
| track record seems prudent to me.

Agree on "prudent" -- but there is also a danger that new people are
not coming into the play at the rate that will support FreeBSD's
future needs.  This may be not prudent, either.

I personally do not use the port I maintain -- I grabbed it to learn
the port building process, and enhance my experience with FreeBSD in
general, to be of, perhaps, more use in the future (but the port is
not completely unrelated to my other activities, which makes the
maintainership meaningful).

Could do more for the project -- but looks like nobody needs it.  Oh,
well, I am not insisting.  (I do official builds and support CMUCL on
FreeBSD, and that keeps my hands busy and spirits high already :-).

| > Take also a look at the history of an attempt to volunteer elsewhere
| > in http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=136263.
| 
| I understand your frustration, but the mysql ports are key ports that have
| been handled for a long time by their current maintainer.  (He has 234
| commits over the past 12 months, with only one maintainer-timeout during
| that time, which suggests to me that he's doing a good job.)  I can see
| why a committer would be reluctant to commit that upgrade because of that.

How a new port would have broken the existing ones?  (5.4 is not an
upgrade -- it's a separate port not touching 5.0, 5.1 or 6.0.)

Mind you, I have no regrets about not getting the ownership of that
new port -- makes life easier for me.  But the person who took it (and
more power to him!), seems to be overbooked (judging by his
responsiveness and the lag of MySQL ports behind the core
distributions.)

So, here was the port team's chance to add somebody who had learned
the ropes already, could grow more and relieve the pressure on the
current players.  Not a big loss to miss the chance, but then the
words "we need more volunteers, committers etc."  sound insincere.

Grow them rather than let people hoard ports that they don't actively
maintain.

-- Alex -- alex-goncharov at comcast.net --