status of FreeBSD ports you maintain as of 20090705

[Mark Linimon]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 07:37:27PM +0200, Martin Tournoij wrote:
> I now know more than ever why I switched to OpenBSD.
> FreeBSD people no longer seem to care about broken ports, or making people
> who submit broken patches maintainers, or even replying to my messages.

First of all, I have to apologize that I did not track this thread (which
I myself started) more closely.  I had assumed that maintainerships were
being handed off well.  I was wrong.

You have to understand: when I send out the 'status of FreeBSD ports'
emails, I am sending them to maintainers who have already had 2 or more
maintainer-timeouts (i.e. failure to respond to PRs).  (Sorry, I don't
usually get around to the maintainers who only have one :-/ )

In almost all of these cases, the maintainers have either a) lost interest
in maintaining their ports, or b) now lack the time to respond to PRs
about their ports.  It usually takes an email or two to establish which
of the two that it is -- but in most cases, the result is that the ports
wind up being reassigned.

In a few cases, the maintainers promise to do better, and retain their
ports.  But I can't recall a case where the maintainer said "I'll maintain
them for a little while -- but then give them up."  So I can understand
where a committer would see a posting, and say, "ok, these are up for
reassignment."  (I think this is a fair reading of the "here are the ports
I maintain" list.)

> I've been waiting for more than a week to revert the maintainer switch

I can't speak to that; I have not talked to the committer in question.
However, there is a lot of traffic that goes by on the mailing list
every week ...

> The same guy that broke this port is now the scribus maintainer and a
> maintainer of a bunch of other ports, hope you don't use scribus since I
> suspect the quality of the port will not improve.

The way that we have things set up is that: we hope that maintainers will
submit good updates; but we rely on committers to ensure that the updates
they commit are necessary and sufficient.  This is why we have a mentorship
period for committers -- there are "things you just need to know" that may
not be sufficiently detailed in the Porter's Handbook.

Most maintainers start off not understanding the ins-and-outs of the Ports
Collection.  We try to help by making the Porter's Handbook as complete as
we can; however, there is some degree of "learning on the job".  Remember:
we're a volunteer project.  (Also: this is supposed to be "fun", not a job,
right??? :-) )

So if a particular maintainer doesn't understand how things work (yet), it's
the job of the committers to educate him/her so that we can turn their
enthusiasm into a more concrete contribution.

But everyone's got to start somewhere.

To summarize: my own view is that we don't want bad patches or bad updates
to be committed; but our committers are human, too.  It's worth repeating
that we rely on our committers to be responsible for verifying that the
changes that they're committing are correct and useful; but, they're
volunteers as well, so we have to rely on a combination of constructive
criticism and encouragement to try to improve things.

mcl