opinions on porting software in alpha state?

[Tom McLaughlin]

On Mon, 2006-03-06 at 10:21 +0000, Florent Thoumie wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 22:01 -0600, Mark Linimon wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 04:44:46AM +0100, Jean-Yves Lefort wrote:
> > > On Mon, 6 Mar 2006 01:22:05 +0300
> > > Dmitry Marakasov <amdmi3 at mail.ru> wrote:
<snip>
> 
> NetBSD has pkgsrc-wip, I think eik and clement used to work on some
> external project like this one (hosted on sourceforge).

That was Ports Rookies (http://sourceforge.net/projects/portrookies/),
the original announcement was here:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=2035764+2040563
+/usr/local/www/db/text/2003/freebsd-ports/20031116.freebsd-ports

I was never a part of it though but I believe it was created in part due
to the PR backlog at the time and as a place to test experimental
changes to the ports infrastructure. (Ports Rookies was registered on
Source Forge nearly the same week I first installed FreeBSD.  Yes, I
actually know that. :)

OT: Even if Ports Rookies was a total bust from searching the mailing
list archives on SF I've always liked one of the other leading ideas
behind the project, providing a forum for new submitters/contributors to
interact with committers and have their work critiqued and checked.
Hanging out on #FreeBSD-Gnome and bugging the committers there was how I
started.  I know Gnome has two projects for drawing in new contributors,
Gnome Love and the Bugsquad.  I haven't checked on how they're run or
how successful they are though.

>  Maybe if there
> were an official statement about this (and more people working on it),
> we could have alpha-quality software/ports there and integrate them
> later in the ports collection.
> 
> Additionally, some magical tool to merge ports-wip with ports (maybe
> marcuscom's script) would be more than useful.
> 

Don't forget mono-merge from BSD#, we use the same idea too! :)

Tom

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