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

[Mark Linimon]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 01:12:52PM +0200, Pav Lucistnik wrote:
> > I see such PRs as useful. At least the save effort for people having
> > the same problem, pointing them to a known deficiency. And they *might*
> > still get fixed.
> 
> In theory, yes.
> 
> In practice, majority of them never see a single followup and all they
> serve for is to keep GNATS numbers high.

While I think I can claim to have done as much work as most people on
trying to get the GNATS numbers down, I don't think we should close PRs
that are pointing out still-existing problems just because they're old
just to get the numbers down.  That's what, IMHO, the "suspended" state
is for, if you look at the documentation ("problem is known but no one
is working on this.")

> We should have a gang of people scouring GNATS, reproducing problems and
> obtaining more details from submitters and maintainers. We don't have
> such people now.

We do have certain dedicated people that do exactly that, and they rarely
get thanked (thank you folks, you know who you are!)  But certainly we
could always use more.

> Whole another deal is if we should be fixing flaws in the software
> itself, or even adding new features.

Nope.  The Ports Collection should be a framework for installing
someone's else's software on FreeBSD.  PRs about new features, or bugs
in the softwanre itself, need to be closed and the submitter referred
to the author(s).  IIRC the PR Submission Guidelines state this.  PRs
should be about something not working _on FreeBSD specifically_.

mcl