PR Load Solutions

[Jesse Smith]

----Original Message-----
From: Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com>
To: Jesse Smith <jessefrgsmith at yahoo.ca>
Cc: freebsd-ports at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: PR Load Solutions
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:55:32 -0500

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 06:46:36AM -0700, Jesse Smith wrote:
>I would be happy to take over maintaining those to ease the load.

OK, we always welcome help :-)  If you need help submitting PRs, let
us know.

> Veteran maintainers might not like the idea of new blood having commit
> access, which is understandable, but I'd like to help out.

The issue isn't about "not liking" -- it's more of a question of trust.
We're asking our users to trust that the ports come from known places
and have been through at least some kind of QA.  To do that, we've set
up a minimum threshhold to get commit access (a track record with filed
PRs; some demonstrated ability to work with user questions; and so forth).

It's actually not that difficult, in general, to wind up with a ports
commit bit.

mcl




Perhaps I should have phrased that differently. I realize there needs to
be a level of trust. Having come in recently to the world of Ports, it
looks to me like there may be a small catch-22 involved. That is, people
gain trust by submitting (and getting approved) PRs, but the existing
maintainers seem to be too busy to keep up with the PRs coming in. Which
means it takes a long time to earn that level of trust.

I'm not saying I have a solution. Just that I'd like to help out as much
as the veteran maintainers are willing.

On a related note, what about trying to actively attract upstream
maintainers to help out with the ports of their projects? I didn't even
know until recently that two of my projects had been added to the Ports
tree. Once I found out, I wanted to help keep those ports maintained and
up to date. Maybe other up-stream developers could be recruited to
babysit their ports?

- Jesse