Maintaining mono/.net

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 11:06:02AM -0700, Russell Haley wrote:
> 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!
> 
There are absolutely nothing against this. Actually some ports were already
doing that before the github era :D

The only difficulty the history told us is : when active people get less active
for various reasons you need to make sure enough people continues to get access
to the said repo.

Tracking upstream updates because more complicated for people not in the team
(we already saw in the past ports stucked for more than 5/6 years actions being
taken (maintainer of the forked becoming mostly MIA)

It also depends how many patches you end up with, I haven't checked the
mono/.net ports but if that is just a bunch of small patches then the overhead
is not worth the pain, if there are lots of patches then sure maintaining your
repo is simpler.

Depending on how active you (the team) are and how close to the upstream you are
one can also see those repositories as "temporary" until all the amount of
patches are upstreamed and when done the ports can switch back to the official
distfiles (this is always a goal for ports upstreaming all our patches so we can
remain as close as possible from the vanilla sources)

That said I do applause the effort. As a conclusion do what ever you think is
the easiest mechanism for you as long as things like monodevelop and friends can
be pushed in a working state again.

Best regards,
Bapt
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