about the idleness of some port maintainers

[Anders Nordby]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 09:01:48AM +0200, Bjoern Koenig wrote:
> isn't there a emergency plan in case of unreachable port maintainers?

The porters handbook mentions this explicitly, go read
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/makefile-maintainer.html.

> For example: print/acroread7 is broken for more than two weeks, there is 
> a good patch in the PR database and nobody does anything; just waiting 
> for the maintainer which didn't respond to emails for a month.

This port is special, there has been different opinions about what and
how to deal with it.

If it is PR ports/81233 you are thinking about, pav asked the maintainer
on may 19. So if he did not get any feedback, he should be free to
commit the patch today actually.

> This is not an individual case. I noticed this idleness with other port 
> maintainers too. I know that most people are very busy in their real 
> life and FreeBSD is just a secondary concern, but on the other hand this 
> makes ports very inflexible.

I disagree. Popular ports usually get dealt with in a rather fast manner.
But it depends on whether people actually submit good patches, or expect
others to do it.

> What do you think about explicit guide lines to let people with commit 
> privileges override the maintainer's prerogative of approving port 
> updates. Such guide lines might say that critical or unbreaking patches 
> are allowed to be commited after one or two weeks or even earlier if the 
> maintainer didn't respond to previous invocations. I saw also minor 
> addenda to certain ports in the PR database which are very useful but 
> waste away due to unreachable maintainers.

Please, do read the guidelines that are already there.

Cheers,

-- 
Anders.