"Being a port maintainer" document

Haulmark, Chris chris at sigd.net
Sat Dec 11 16:02:12 PST 2004


Someone broke the silence: 

> 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

I have an interest.  There are several ports that come to mind that I
believe that I can be capable of.

Chris


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