What is the problem with ports PR reaction delays?

[Pawel Biernacki]

On 26 January 2014 18:34, Big Lebowski <spankthespam at gmail.com> wrote:
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> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Big Lebowski <spankthespam at gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 12:30 AM
> Subject: What is the problem with ports PR reaction delays?
> To: freebsd-ports <freebsd-ports at freebsd.org>
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>
> Hi everyone,
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> I wanted to ask about the growing time of reaction to ports PR's - what is the problem? It seems to me, as a ports contributor, that this time is only growing, not shrinking, and there's no formal/automated procedures that would help in managing the issue.
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> Today I found myself fighting with ezjail only to discover it has issues working on FreeBSD 10.0-R. Great, I thought, there must be something else, so I went to make the research. It appears there isnt much more, and the alternatives are qjail that seems to be quite dated and zjails, that's not in ports. Not long after looking into zjails, what seems to be a great tool, I found its port submission sits there since... September 2013. Now, given the fact the Docker is on mouth of everyone, and containers are getting a lot of attention, FreeBSD looks really bad with no tools to manage such great technology like Jails, especially when ezjail, unofficial industry standard to manage jails, is now broken and zjails waits to be accepted (or even rejected) for so much time.
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> What is the problem? Isnt there enought commiters? Isnt there a automated PR handling procedure reminding commiters with relevant access about such submissions? Can we help? I hope to spark some discussion.
>

Maybe it's time to look at how other projects with comparable amount
of contributed software manage to do it efficiently? How is that the
Debian folks are able to keep nearly 50k packages in four stages
(unstable, testing, stable, oldstable) not to mention branches like
Hurd or kFreeBSD? Do they just have more committers or maybe it's a
matter of involvement? Why? ports/svnadmin/conf/access shows 179
committers but how many of them is actually active? If they are no
longer interested, do not have time or anything else maybe you should
take the commit bit from them, not to make a false impression on
amount of people involved? Just give a chance to another person who
has time and wants to spend it working for the project - so for all of
us. IMO it's better than deceiving yourself that there's nothing you
can do about the long PRs queue, because you don't want to force
others to do anything. We saw several volunteers here, let them act.


-- 
One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never
even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.