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

[Mark Linimon]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 12:59:04PM +0200, Roman Neuhauser wrote:
> > I no longer have the statistics online but from the last time I went
> > through this it is about twice more likely that an unmaintained port:
> > 
> >  - has PRs against it
> >  - is broken
> >  - is out-of-date
> 
> I cannot dispute the latter two, but have you included these in your
> calculations?
> 
> When people see the port is maintained:
> 
> - they communicate directly with the maintainer

That's the preferred way.

> - they wait for the maintainer to fix/update the port instead of
>   submitting a patch

This isn't effective.

> - they don't bother at all, because the maintainer won't respond
>   anyway (applies to specific maintainers)

That's why we have the 2-week timeout and why we reset inactive
maintainers.  But if people are not sending patches in these cases, we'll
never know when this is happening, will we?  If people can't grow thick
enough skins to send PRs and try to get them in even if it's via
maintainer timeouts, we're going to degenerate to a situation where
everyone is sitting around waiting for that mythical Someone Else to
do something, and the ports will just continue to rot.

I mean, what's the alternative you're proposing?  Just give up on the
idea of maintainership entirely because there's some number of people
who aren't doing anything?

We already encourage people who have lost interest in their ports (no
longer using them, press of real life, whatever reason) to go ahead
and drop them.  There remain the cases where the maintainer is no longer
even at that email address, and we reap those email addresses when they
bounce.  (Every time someone has tried to push for sending periodic
email to maintainers, either to ask "are you still interested" or "here
are the latest commits to your ports", there have been strong objections.)

On occasion I've reset maintainerships myself due to the 3-month inactivity
period.  On the last two of those, other people immediately picked up
several of those ports and updated them.

Other than this, what is your alternative?

mcl