X.Org 7.0 port?

[Mark Linimon]

On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 01:56:44PM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> I **DO** choose to take on the responsibility of maintaining the
> www/suphp, www/cgiwrap, and games/nethack ports.  Are these programs
> my code?  Nope, but any problems my ports cause other FreeBSD users
> or administrators **are** my problem.  I take my PRs VERY seriously,
> and I urge people to submit them + contact me.  I take part in the
> mailing lists for these softwares, and do my best to communicate
> issues/problems with the actual author(s) of the code, so they are
> kept in the loop.  I try VERY hard to be prompt about my responses
> (within 24 hours).

Well, in a perfect world, this would be true.  But in the imperfect
world we live in, there are bugs, in some cases in very, very, large
codebases.  If I felt an absolute obligation to fix _every_ possible
problem with a package I, personally, would never touch anything
sufficiently complicated, such as xorg, KDE, GNOME, or OpenOffice.

I think you are discounting the demotivating effect that this thread
has had on some of the people that are doing some very heavy lifting
here.  Any of the above packages are simply far too complex to be
completely maintained by one or even two or three people.

Remember, we have 4335 unmaintained ports right now.  The higher we raise
the bar for what we insist that maintainers do, the less maintainers we
are going to have.  In _theory_ we would like to have maintainers who
support all users on all releases and all architectures.  We ask, politely,
that they do so.  But if we try to insist that everyone _must_ do this,
we're going to wind up with a smaller group of individuals trying to
maintain the ever-growing list of ports.

As for rights: please feel free to have the right to complain, but please
understand that people like me are just going to pull their hair out at
some point.  We also have the right to reply with exasperation.  We try
not to, but sometimes it's very difficult.

The idea is to try to keep everyone motivated and pointed in more or less
the same direction.  I had hoped that my light-hearted response to the
initial post in this thread would kind of deflect this whole direction,
and I regret that I failed in doing that.  Beacause of that, I think I'm
just going to drop out of this thread.  I think everything useful that I
could say has been said, and then I kept talking :-(

mcl