Maintaining mono/.net

[Russell Haley]

Hi David,

Apparently I was mistaken, there is no way to "apply" to an
organization.  Please feel free to send me your handle like David, and
I'll add you.

And just in case anyone is fuzzy on GitHub access: There is no need to
join the FreeBSD-DotNet organization to create pull requests (i.e.
push patches) and our end products should wind up in the Ports tree
when we are done.

Cheers,

Russ

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 12:58 PM, Russell Haley <russ.haley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting. Sorry about that, I will add you and look into it asap.
>
> Russ
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Koodo network.
>   Original Message
> From: David Naylor
> Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2016 12:36 PM
> To: Russell Haley
> Subject: Re: Maintaining mono/.net
>
> Hi Russell,
>
> There doesn't appear to be any way to request being added to the FreeBSD-
> DotNet organisation via the link below.
>
> Would you please consider adding me this organisation. My GitHub handle is
> DragonSA.
>
> Regards,
>
> On Tuesday, 28 June 2016 22:46:09 Russell Haley wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 2:43 AM, Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at freebsd.org>
> wrote:
>> > 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
>>
>> Thanks for the input everyone. I think the overhead of keeping
>> volatile patches in a globally accessible area is worth while. One of
>> the things I struggled with historically is how to share my local
>> changes that I couldn't commit to the svn tree.
>>
>> I have created an open source organization called FreeBSD-DotNet in
>> Github. I have differentiated from the Mono moniker because the
>> merging of the frameworks is inevitable with the purchase of Xamarian.
>>
>> I went a little crazy and forked a whole bunch of stuff, which I now
>> think is a bad idea. The only thing that currently requires
>> customization would be the ports tree itself (MonoDevelop doesn't
>> build yet, but I haven't needed to change any code). However, I think
>> we can put a bunch of how-to and wiki stuff in there for the
>> development efforts.
>>
>> SO, with that: Anyone wishing to join the FreeBSD-DotNet organization
>> can go to https://github.com/FreeBSD-DotNet and send a request. I'll
>> try to flesh out an outstanding items list that can be ratified
>> sometime in the next couple of weeks.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Russ