Fwd: Re: ports/164244: multimedia/mplayer: last update (1.0.r20111218) conflicts with devel/ncurses

[Thomas Zander]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 18:04, Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:

> So if there's breakage, then it needs to be first understood, then
> dealt with.  If there is no other way than the horrible backout/PORTEPOCH
> dance, then so be it.

That's correct.
However I think that in this situation there was no need to consider a
PORTEPOCH. It was not the first temporary build problem that one of
the 15k ports has and it certainly won't be the last.

On a side note: I am actually proud to work with a project where one
can spot a problem, report it, discuss solutions and patches and have
it fixed in the official repository in (looking at
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=164244) less than 20 hours!
There are many prestigious projects out there that cannot keep up with
FreeBSD in this regard. Just sayin'.

> But the takeaway is that we can't expect the PR submitters, or even
> port maintainers, to get anything right.  It sure makes life easier
> when they do, but we can't take it for granted.
> As committers, we are that QA step.

And we maintainers appreciate that there is a QA step represented by a
committer. Trust me, I do! Still there is always the possibility that
even a committer can't foresee every possible side effect that a
commit could have. The main point remains imho that we as a group are
able to find problems fast and fix them quickly, as we have done in
this case.

Regards,
Riggs