GNAT port is broken, maintainer don't care

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 03:56:58PM +0200, Rico Secada wrote:
> Simply put: "I am a maintainer of a port on FreeBSD, but I only have time to run current, and thus doesn't care a rats ass about if the port works on RELEASE, eventhough thats the most widely used version of FreeBSD."
> 
> This can't be right!

You have to remember that with ports, it's at the discretion of
the port author to test his/her port on different architectures and
different setups.  That said...

The port is his responsibility: *PERIOD*.  If he doesn't want the
responsibility of testing his work on non-CURRENT releases, then
he should either 1) find someone who can test it for him that
doesn't use CURENT, or 2) step down from maintaining the port.

In his defence, there is still the chance that all of your machines
that you maintain are misconfigured.  I don't care if you have a
thousand of them -- if they're all poorly maintained or improperly
managed (such as not using mergemaster, not following installworld
procedures per /usr/src/Makefile step-by-step, not following
UPDATING changes, etc.), then it wouldn't be the fault of the
port maintainer.  I have seen entire clusters of FreeBSD machines
incorrectly maintained before, where the admins were absolutely
BOFH-ish with their opinion that "they were being managed right".

I'm not saying that's the case here -- so please don't take it
personally -- but it's something to take into consideration
before passing judgement.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                        http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP: 4BD6C0CB |