PR Load Solutions

[Jesse Smith]

-----Original Message-----
From: freebsd-ports-request at freebsd.org
Reply-to: freebsd-ports at freebsd.org
To: freebsd-ports at freebsd.org
Subject: freebsd-ports Digest, Vol 373, Issue 1
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:00:25 +0000 (UTC)

> 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?

This has some drawbacks, especially for smaller upstream projects, so
this  
should be decided case by case:

- if I am doing most of the upstream work, there are fewer eyes to look
at  
the FreeBSD port;

- upstream maintainers may in some cases be less familiar with
FreeBSD,  
they may not even use it. One such example is sysutils/e2fsprogs,
another  
security/openvpn; just from my collection.

- upstream maintainers may be very good at programming, project  
management, whatever; FreeBSD port maintainers always cannot be too
alien  
to systems administration.

- it usually pays off if the maintainer is actively using FreeBSD and
the  
port he is maintaining. This is often not the case, otherwise the
upstream  
maintainer already is the port maintainer :)

If this is done in the wrong way, it will backfire and actually raise  
support burden because the load of getting the actual "porting" part  
(FreeBSD adjustments) done propagates to committers...
Sure there are cases when the upstream maintainer is the port
maintainer  
(f.i. news/leafnode, mail/bogofilter*), but I'm not sure this could fly
as  
a general concept.

Note this is a personal opinion, not necessarily consensus. I'm /not/  
posting on behalf of FreeBSD here.

Best regards
Matthias

-- 
Matthias 'mandree@' Andree 




I see where you're coming from. Admittedly I came to the party only
recently. But I've found that, in trying to get my projects into Ports,
I'm finding things in my code that could be more cross-platform
friendly. So it's been a positive learning experience for me. I'm hoping
other upstream developers can be encouraged to help out with their
ports. Especially ports that have already been committed and just need
minor adjustments. 

You mentioned the tinderbox. Is that a clean build environment in a
jail/chroot? I use something like that to build PBI modules on PC-BSD,
but I haven't tried using such as tool for Ports.

- Jesse