status of FreeBSD ports you maintain as of 20090705

[Mark Linimon]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 05:44:57PM -0400, Alex Goncharov wrote:
> Could do more for the project -- but looks like nobody needs it.  Oh,
> well, I am not insisting.

Persistence is the name of the game.  The more PRs you submit, the more
you are likely to attract the attention of the existing committers, and
that's the track to becoming a new committer.

> How a new port would have broken the existing ones?  (5.4 is not an
> upgrade -- it's a separate port not touching 5.0, 5.1 or 6.0.)

 - CONFLICTS must be set properly

 - latest_link must be set properly

 - the name can't be the exact same as an existing port (kind of equal to
   latest-link being right)

 - must be added correctly in category Makefile

These are the most common errors people make when adding new ports.  Yes,
they are all easily learned.

> the words "we need more volunteers, committers etc." sound insincere.

We have a tremendous backlog of PRs and not all incoming PRs get noticed.
However, historically, folks who persist and send a large number of PRs
_do_ get noticed.  But it doesn't happen overnight.

Anyways, I don't think I'm going to be able to change your mind about
this topic, so I'll step back and listen to other people's opinions now.

mcl