blanket portmgr approval vs. non-fixing changes

[Kevin Golding]

On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 21:21:31 +0100, Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at komquats.com>  
wrote:

> In message <57716D89.1050108 at sorbs.net>, Michelle Sullivan writes:

>> Don't forget that many people see their name/email in the maintainer
>> line as being responsible for the port.. so someone goes makes blanket
>> changes which actually breaks stuff.. that reflects on the person in the
>> Maintainer line - whether you want it to do so or not, whether you
>> believe it or not..
>
> I think it's more than the maintainer perceives that they're responsible.
> Getting that email from freebsd-pkg-fallout I think there was and maybe
> still is a general impression that is had. I for one take the attitude,  
> you
> break it, you fix it and I don't hesitate to email any committer who  
> made a
> blanket change that broke something. It's only fair because fixing  
> breakage
> caused by others also takes away from other productive work and projects,
> as some of us do have time constraints and time pressure due to other
> commitments.

I think it goes beyond just breakages though. Recently I had a couple of  
ports to update so I made sure my tree was current first thing in the  
morning, I went through and updated. Then I ran all the build logs etc.  
submitted my patches to bugzilla - and about the same time someone did a  
blanket update of RUN_DEPENDS in my ports. Including a PORTREVISION bump.  
It's easy to argue that's a very trivial change that doesn't needs  
maintainer involvement, but it also impacted my day.

So I updated my tree again and did the whole process again which was  
inconvenient, but I also found myself cringing at any users of the port  
perhaps updating on the PORTREVISION and then a couple of days later when  
my more complete update was committed having to do it again. I thought it  
looked bad as I was obsoleting the patches and build logs I submitted a  
couple of hours earlier too.

Had I known about the blanket update I could've rolled that into my  
updates or something, but it was just suddenly there. There was no public  
warning of that change coming (and I did search the relevant lists just to  
make sure I hadn't missed something). Luckily my ports are mostly trivial  
so the actual impact was fairly low, but it still annoyed me and made me  
feel that it made me look bad. It still took extra time to do these simple  
updates, especially once I started wondering what I'd missed to not catch  
this beforehand. I felt rather lucky that I'm quite a low volume  
maintainer in that regard because it could've easily sucked up a lot more  
of my time.

On the flipside blanket updates will logically come from people who give  
far more time to this stuff than me. Will they be happy with having to  
jump through hoops for the likes of me? If I'm unhappy about the extra  
time this caused me maybe I'm being unfair in asking them to spend time  
checking for pending updates before doing something. Maybe I just need to  
suck it up and let the big players do their thing.

-- 
Kevin