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

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

Mark Linimon wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 12:11:40AM +0430, Babak Farrokhi wrote:

>>There is really something wrong with the port management process.
>>People's work is not being respected. So how do I get encouraged to
>>submit my patches?
> 
> We have 173 people with port commit bits (some of whom are more active
> than others) and an average of around 30 ports PRs arriving per day.
> Since all the ports committers are volunteers, it's not possible to
> compel them to commit anything -- all we can do is to encourage, and to
> offer recognition.  I think we do pretty well keeping up with the
> incoming PR flood (the rate of which, by the way, continues to increase.)
> 
> It's not a perfect process, but I really don't know of what else that
> we can do in a volunteer project.

As a maintainer of a few of the ports, I am really quite pleased with 
how well it works.  I think it depends a bit on your expectations.  I 
never expect my updates to be looked at very quickly (but sometimes I am 
pleasantly surprized), but I always find that my updates are looked at 
after a couple of months.  Considering that this is a volunteer project, 
I consider this completely acceptable.

I think it is a question of whether you see the glass as half full or 
half empty.

Stephen