Solutions for the PR load problem

[Dominic Fandrey]

Currently the PR load is obviously too high for the committer team
to deal with. From a maintainer perspective this is rather painful,
I have currently stopped updating all my ports, because I want
pending updates committed first and also want to avoid running into
PR dependencies (ioquake3, openarena and iourbanterror are 
examples in my case).

Also it adds the burden of adjusting your patches every time the
PORTREVISION is bumped, because of a library update, thus producing
additional workload without benefit to anyone.

To solve this problem with the current organization, my guess is
that between 15 and 30 new active committers are required.
Because I don't think this is easily achieved I want to suggest
a different approach. And I expect many others also have their
own ideas how this can be solved.

Proposal:
My idea is that experienced Maintainers get commit permission
for their own ports. I don't even think such a thing needs to
be enforced technically, after all who'd want to risk his
experienced maintainer bit, however this is possible (and people
would probably sleep better).

Technical Approach:
One, though not the only, technical approach is to switch to SVN
and use path based access control. A pretty primitive shell script,
probably less than 10 lines could generate the SVN path
configuration, from just a list of users. It need not even be
run on the server and wouldn't have to be run often.

There also exist solutions that add similar features to CVS, but
I do prefer SVN.

Pros:
- Less Maintainer-Update PRs
- Maintainers can deal with third party patches directly instead
  of just providing feedback, so the actual ports committers
  would only have to close the PRs
- Path based access control can be turned off during ports freezes

Cons:
- Higher server load
- Additional user management
- Testing guidlines in the Porters' Handbook need to be extended
- Experienced Maintainers have to be defined

Regards

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