[DRAFT] ports contributor's guide
Charles Swiger
cswiger at mac.com
Sat Dec 6 13:33:30 PST 2003
On Dec 5, 2003, at 12:13 AM, Mark Linimon wrote:
> (I should also mention that I have the ability to send email to
> mainainers who are not committers, reminding them of existing
> PRs in case they have forgotten, or especially, were not Cc:ed
> in the first place. It got a pretty good response the last time
> I ran it).
GNATS would be more useful if it did this-- mailing the maintainer of a
port-- automatically if that person was not CC'ed on the PR submission
email.
[ In other words, is it convenient to automate this "ability"? :-) ]
> The other thing that I wanted to put in the Porter's Handbook
> but got reviewed negatively at the time is a section on "ask whether
> FreeBSD really needs this port". There is a cost of infrastructure
> time and people's QA time to keep the ports framework workable,
> and just because someone's got a Sourceforge project doesn't
> necessarily mean that FreeBSD necessarily ought to have it in
> there. (Basically, I want the test to be "do you think it's going to
> be useful to someone else?")
A new port submission that hasn't been committed is effectively in the
"do we need this state?" If there is reason to question whether the
port is useful, can't the committer looking at the PR say so with due
tact:
"Second opinion -- duplicates ports/misc/foo1 ... 4"
...or some such, indicating that the reviewer wants a second opinion
from someone else as to whether the port should be committed (and what
the issue is), leaving the PR open and the port uncommitted?
> At that same time, I also got a poor reception to my idea suggesting
> that if a submitter of a new port wasn't willing to be the maintainer,
> then perhaps we should think twice about putting the port in as well.
I'm not convinced that putting a comprehensive list of reasons why a
committer should reject a new port in the Porter's Handbook is the best
way of encouraging people to contribute to the ports system. On the
other hand, I don't see any harm in the PH containing a suggestion that
being willing to maintain a port one submits is appreciated, will
contribute to rapid committal, etc.
> [ ...data about unmaintained ports being 40% more likely to be
BROKEN... ]
Would it be useful to feed new port submissions to build machine for
testing to see whether they are broken before the port submission is
reviewed by a human? Hmph, misformatted PR's would still require human
intervention, so this probably wouldn't be that useful.
--
-Chuck
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