"Being a port maintainer" document

Kris Kennaway kris at obsecurity.org
Sat Dec 11 15:53:16 PST 2004


At the moment, too many of our ports have no maintainer.  This means
that there's no-one available to fix problems that occur with the
ports or to deal with user support questions.  In some cases this is
probably because no-one actually uses the software in question any
more, but in other cases it's probably just because no-one in the user
community has come forward to take over.

I'd like to put out a general call for people to volunteer to maintain
our unmaintained ports -- this is a great way for users to "give
something back" to FreeBSD and help out the project -- but we need
some form of document we can show them that lists the rights and
responsibilities of port maintainers, so they have an idea of what's
expected from them.  The porters' handbook does a good job of
describing the details of constructing a port, but not the
higher-level aspects of being a port maintainer.

e.g.

* Updating the port when a new version is released

* Pushing local changes back upstream to the original authors

* Fixing port errors reported by the package build cluster

* Dealing with user support requests, at least by pointing them to the
upstream developers for cases where it's not clearly a FreeBSD
port-specific problem.

* Evaluating PRs submitted against the port

* Responding to change requests in a timely manner (2 weeks).

* ...

Can someone write up such a document?

Kris
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