blanket portmgr approval vs. non-fixing changes

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 09:12:46AM +0100, Kevin Golding wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 21:21:31 +0100, Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at komquats.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > In message <57716D89.1050108 at sorbs.net>, Michelle Sullivan writes:
> 
> > > Don't forget that many people see their name/email in the maintainer
> > > line as being responsible for the port.. so someone goes makes blanket
> > > changes which actually breaks stuff.. that reflects on the person in the
> > > Maintainer line - whether you want it to do so or not, whether you
> > > believe it or not..
> > 
> > I think it's more than the maintainer perceives that they're responsible.
> > Getting that email from freebsd-pkg-fallout I think there was and maybe
> > still is a general impression that is had. I for one take the attitude,
> > you
> > break it, you fix it and I don't hesitate to email any committer who
> > made a
> > blanket change that broke something. It's only fair because fixing
> > breakage
> > caused by others also takes away from other productive work and projects,
> > as some of us do have time constraints and time pressure due to other
> > commitments.
> 
> I think it goes beyond just breakages though. Recently I had a couple of
> ports to update so I made sure my tree was current first thing in the
> morning, I went through and updated. Then I ran all the build logs etc.
> submitted my patches to bugzilla - and about the same time someone did a
> blanket update of RUN_DEPENDS in my ports. Including a PORTREVISION bump.
> It's easy to argue that's a very trivial change that doesn't needs
> maintainer involvement, but it also impacted my day.
> 
> So I updated my tree again and did the whole process again which was
> inconvenient, but I also found myself cringing at any users of the port
> perhaps updating on the PORTREVISION and then a couple of days later when my
> more complete update was committed having to do it again. I thought it
> looked bad as I was obsoleting the patches and build logs I submitted a
> couple of hours earlier too.
> 
> Had I known about the blanket update I could've rolled that into my updates
> or something, but it was just suddenly there. There was no public warning of
> that change coming (and I did search the relevant lists just to make sure I
> hadn't missed something). Luckily my ports are mostly trivial so the actual
> impact was fairly low, but it still annoyed me and made me feel that it made
> me look bad. It still took extra time to do these simple updates, especially
> once I started wondering what I'd missed to not catch this beforehand. I
> felt rather lucky that I'm quite a low volume maintainer in that regard
> because it could've easily sucked up a lot more of my time.
> 
> On the flipside blanket updates will logically come from people who give far
> more time to this stuff than me. Will they be happy with having to jump
> through hoops for the likes of me? If I'm unhappy about the extra time this
> caused me maybe I'm being unfair in asking them to spend time checking for
> pending updates before doing something. Maybe I just need to suck it up and
> let the big players do their thing.
> 

What you are asking is part of the blanket in particular when changing things in
individual ports, we expect committers to have a look at pending PR (yes I know
I have been guilty of individual port change without sometime checking about
pending PR which was wrong from my side)

For sweeping changes this is a bit different as when a change touches a large
portion of the tree we can not expect the committer to have a look at each
individual ports.

Best regards,
Bapt
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