blanket portmgr approval vs. non-fixing changes (was: svn commit: r417590 - in head/databases/db6: . files and 417595 (revert))

[Kurt Jaeger]

Hi!

[adamw]
> Maintainership too often means that change requests get ignored
> for two weeks before they're committed.

That is the case sometimes, yes.

But oftern maintainership provides identification with the project
and proud of achievement etc, which causes people to invest time
and skills in the project.

Maintainership also provides a point of contact that one can ask
for run-tests or for additional experience some potential port
user can contact. It provides 'community'.

> Aside from large, complex, interconnected systems, I think that
> we should do away with ports maintainership entirely. Maintainership
> serves absolutely no purpose that peer-review wouldn't do better.

If we add to the role of the maintainer the wish from the ports community
to the maintainer that she/he provides some run-test environment and
practical (daily?) experience with a port, that would definitly be
positive. Not all ports would need maintainers, if the role changes
like that.

> Any committer should be able to commit to any port. That used to
> be what ports at FreeBSD.org meant, that it was being maintained by
> everybody.

For complex ports, we do not always have committers that have
run-test resources.

For those it's good to have some maintainer.

> But somehow, in the last few years that turned into a
> message that it's being maintained by nobody, so now ports *have*
> to be maintained by somebody, even if that person never touches it
> again.

The queue of uncommitted ports PRs shows that it's not always
the maintainers that are the bottle-neck, sometimes it's the committers.

-- 
pi at FreeBSD.org         +49 171 3101372                4 years to go !