Can we please just remove the old Makefile headers?

[Eitan Adler]

On 27 August 2012 08:40, Julian H. Stacey <jhs at berklix.com> wrote:
>   On various other older ports, when I couldnt get response in time
>   from MAINTAINER (I don't mean re hylafax), perhaps maintainer on
>   holiday, & I couldn't wait for send-pr tiem out, & didnt want to
>   invoke send-pr, I fell back succesfully, to contacting the Whom:
>   creator, who while no longer regularly motivated to do maintenance,
>   could respond without delay & give hints (fallback maintainer).

Which is exactly the reason we should get rid of the whom lines. The
submitter is *not* a fallback maintainer, and some users mistakenly
assume that the whom line is the maintainer. We should be encouraging
users to mail ports at freebsd.org and possibly cc the maintainer if
required.

>   Some ports are easy to create, eg my lang/pbasic, but some are
>   hard, (eg I'd guess editors/openoffice-3 may have been, One might ask
>         # Whom:                 Martin Blapp

The whom address might be bouncing, the person might be not be using
FreeBSD anymore, or any of the like.

>   Let ports creators retain their one line of credit.  Removing it
>   would save little & be ungrateful, like removing names out of .c
>   & .h.  (Some (inc. me) may like noticing in passing who created
>   the ports one's working on)).  The credit may encourage some ports
>   creators to struggle on, creating sometimes obdurate complex ports
>   one might otherwise be tempted to give up on after a not-yet-port
>   is just hand built & hand tested localy,

Interesting argument. But this implies that we should allow the whom
line to be changed by "creator request"


-- 
Eitan Adler