What is the problem with ports PR reaction delays?

[Fernando Apesteguía]

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 10:32 PM, Pawel Biernacki <pawel.biernacki at gmail.com
> wrote:

> On 26 January 2014 18:34, Big Lebowski <spankthespam at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > ---------- 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>
> >
> >
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
>

As a porter and maintainer, I fully agree about the delay in the processing
of PRs lately.

However, I wouldn't like to add more speculation. Can we put some numbers
to some of the questions asked above? (rate of incoming PR's, rate of
processed PRs, commiters activity, etc) Anybody from the Ports Management
Team is able to do it?

Once we put some figures to that questions, we can take an action, but it
would be unwise to do anything without knowing what the real problem is.

Regards




>
>
> --
> 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.
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-ports at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>