New port with maintainer ports@FreeBSD.org [was: Question about maintainers]

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Thursday, July 28, 2005 16:50:49 -0400 Kris Kennaway 
<kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:
>
> The rule is in place for *new ports* to make submitters take
> responsibility that their new ports actually work, and so that when a
> broken port is added to the tree, someone knows they are on the hook
> to fix the problems that appear with it, whether they are submitted by
> me, or other users of FreeBSD.
>
> It is *very common* for new ports to not work as committed (for
> various reasons that I can go into if you like), and it is often
> necessary for a few rounds of fixes to be developed and committed
> before all problems are resolved.
>
> The rule became necessary after too many ports were committed in a
> broken and unusable state, and the submitters and committers refused
> to address the issues because they assumed that "someone else would
> fix them".  That's pretty irresponsible, and such ports in the tree
> waste my time and waste the time of other FreeBSD users, so this
> behaviour is no longer allowed.
>
> The bottom line is that if you care enough to submit a port for
> FreeBSD, you need to care enough to make sure you submit a *working*
> port to FreeBSD, and that means you list yourself as maintainer at
> least for the first month or so until it is clear that there are no
> outstanding problems with the port.  After then, you can drop
> maintainership if you really don't want to continue to support the
> FreeBSD community in this way.
>
Thanks, Kris, that makes a great deal of sense.

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/