Ada and GNAT maintainership proposition

[Ultima]

The best way to get started with porting is reading the FreeBSD porters
handbook.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/

In order to take maintainership, a pr needs to be filled on bugzilla
requesting the port.



Porting on the most recent -RELEASE version is fine, however It is
recommended to test on current as well. I don't think its a huge issue if
you can't do this though. if it fails on current you will get fallout
messages. It is important to test on all supported releases which can be
found here.

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/

The testing are needed on tier 1 supported architectures which currently
are amd64/i386, of course more is better but not required. The tiers can be
found here.

https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/



All these tests aren't necessarily required by the port maintainer, but it
wont be committed unless they pass these tests. So it is definitely easier
and less time consuming for both committer and maintainer if tests are
completed.


Hope this helps,
Ultima

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 7:43 AM, Natasha Kerensikova <natbsd at instinctive.eu>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm an insignificant FreeBSD user and Ada developer, and over the years
> I've come to rely a lot of both technologies together. I'm very worried
> now that I discovered that Ada-related ports no longer have a maintainer.
> Having thought a lot about it in the past day, I don't have a workable
> exit strategy for either technology, and I don't want to need one.
>
> So the whole point of this e-mail is, what happens now?
>
>
> As far as I can tell, if nobody steps up to take over the
> maintainership, the ports will eventually be considered dead and be
> removed. I think I saw ports stay maintainerless for a long while before
> being dropped, but here we have a lively compiler and a moving standard,
> so it's likely things will break sooner rather than later. Once a port
> is broken, even if it's not reported as broken, its days of
> maintainerless existence are numbered.
>
> So, does anyone care?
>
> I do, but I mean, besides me?
>
> Is there anybody ready to step up and take maintainership and ensure
> these ports continue to work?
> (If there is, don't read the rest of the e-mail, it's moot.)
>
>
> I'm afraid there isn't anybody, and that's why I'm asking here whether I
> can be that somebody.
>
> It would be nice there was some way to make an official distinction
> between standard maintainership and maintainership-by-default-because-I-
> want-it-to-work-but-I-would-gladly-hand-it-to-anyone-interested.
>
> The problem is that Marino's shoes are difficult to fill. I'm basically
> applying for a position while I have no experience (I only compiled gcc
> three times in my life), no relevant skill (except reading C), and
> almost no time. The only thing preventing me from being the most
> ill-suited person for the role is that I care. Is it enough?
>
> I'm used to imposter's syndrome, but taking for example the recent thread
> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2017-April/108130.html
> that's already way beyond my league.
>
> On top of that, I'm only running recent -RELEASE, I'm not sure I can
> find a box on which to run -CURRENT, and I don't hope having some
> -STABLE or older -RELEASE available. That limits quite a bit my testing
> capabilities.
>
> I think I can handle the load of being the contact person for these
> ports and dealing with the bugtracker and things like that. So if there
> is anyone reading this with a bit of technical expertise to help but who
> doesn't want to deal with the communication part of the maintainership,
> please let me know, so I can volunteer less shakily.
>
>
> So at this point, is there anybody to talk me out of trying to maintain
> gcc-aux and some of the Ada ports left behind?
>
> What is the procedure to ask for maintainership on these?
>
> I still haven't fully sketched the exact list of package I would try to
> claim, but I use daily lang/gcc6-aux, www/aws, devel/florist-gpl, and
> devel/gprbuild; I occasionally use devel/adacurses and devel/gnatcoll;
> and I could easy integrate into my workflow lang/adacontrol and
> lang/asis. I would take some more, going out of my way to test them, but
> I'll have to think about which ones are within my reach. The gnatdroid
> and gnatcross ones are almost certainly not.
>
>
> Thanks for your patience,
> Natasha
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