New Porter Question.

[Mark Linimon]

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 falaki at ce.sharif.edu wrote:

> Hello every body
>         I am a freebsd user and fan and speak Persian.

Glad to have you with us!

> There are now plenty of Persian (Farsi) software available on Linux -
> thanks to FarsiLinux project and others. Some of these are available in
> the ports tree in misc/ directory but most are not. I think it would
> be great to gather them all in a Persian/ directory like many other
> languages, especially because their number is going to increase soon.

For the moment, misc/ is probably the right category.

> I am willing and would be very happy to do the job and have began
> reading the porters handbook, but I don't know who I should contact.

Well, submitting the changes for consideration is something that you
can do, but making the changes yourself isn't :-)

The best dicussion for the procedure is documented, not in the
Porter's Handbook where it obviously should be, but in the FreeBSD
Committer's Guide at
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/ports.html.

It's less necessary that you understand each step of the procedure if
you're not a committer, who will be reponsible for making sure all the
pieces work.  But it is helpful to understand that a pretty fair amount
of work _is_ involved, and in general the ports management team is
reluctant to do it for a category that won't attract a fair number of
ports.  (We're still considering a spanish/ category, which we arguably
should have; with the long release schedule we had for 5.3 we mostly
put such structural changes on hold and are only now starting to get
caught back up).

A guess would be that at least 10 should move.  Would you mind listing
the existing ones and give us an idea of the proposed new ones?  Once
it seems like that's more than a few, then you could send a PR with
some of the particulars.

mcl