Maintaining mono/.net

[Russell Haley]

Hello Ports Team,

A couple of us on the freebsd-mono@ mailing list are having a
discussion on how best to maintain the mono ports/.net ports. One of
the things that has come up is maintaining the patches for "all this
stuff". The current paradigm in FreeBSD as I understand it is to use
the files directory and apply the patches to the port via svn/ports
tree. However, with the ubiquity of GitHub in opensource, it now seems
to be feesable to simply create a Github accound to maintain a bunch
of forked repositories (which is essentially a patched git
repository!). This makes it easier to create and apply patches and
gives us the natural path to push things back upstream. In the end, we
would just pull from the FreeBSD specific repository, which is no
different than, say, pulling from the mono project directly.

This email is a request for response from anyone on the ports team (or
FreeBSD general) to give some input as to the acceptability of this
solution, as well as any "gotchas" we haven't thought of yet. Thanks
in advance!


Russ