maintainership

[Matthew Seaman]

On 29/08/2016 07:35, Rommel Escuadro wrote:
> What is the knowledge requirement for adopting a port?

The literal, by the book, answer is that you have to understand enough
about standard development tools to be able to generate a diff changing
the MAINTAINER line to your own e-mail address, and enough about
Bugzilla that you can open a PR, attach your diff to it and request
maintainership.

The practical answer in many cases is that you can frequently just ask
to be given maintainership on e-mail or IRC or whatever, and some
committer will generally oblige.

The deeper answer here is that it isn't really about knowledge: it's
about commitment.  You're making an undertaking to track development in
an upstream project, to represent the FreeBSD user base to them, push
FreeBSD related patches upstream and ultimately pull upstream's changes
into the ports tree in a timely fashion.

Yes, having a level of technical understanding of the port you are
maintaining is important, but you by no means have to be an expert, nor
do you need to be instantly capable of debugging anything that may get
reported to you.  You do have to be willing to investigate and help
putting together a useful bug report and to perform whatever testing is
necessary and to answer both upstream's and the end-users' questions.
As necessary, that is.  Usually once the port is written and there's
been an initial round of bugfixes and patches, it's then very much plain
sailing to occasionally bring in the latest changes upstream produces.
Plus if you do get thrown a curve ball you can't handle, then there are
a lot of extremely knowledgeable and helpful people just an e-mail away
on this very list.

	Cheers,

	Matthew


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