Re: FreeBSD ports disabled for bsdforge

Gleb Popov <arrowd@freebsd.org> wrote:

> > But I didn't realise it was only 6 days! Jeeze, I have many PR's that haven't
> > been looked at it months!
>
> There is a misconception that portmgr@ is in charge of going through
> open unassigned PRs and committing them. But this is actually ports
> committers' job.

Gleb, I appreciate your calm and rational explanation, but it just seems
like something is going on which I am not a part of.

I sent the initial mail privately to Chris. He replied, and (quite fairly)
CC'd in the ports mailing list.

I stupidly didn't notice this when I replied, so I thought I was replying
to Chris only.

I'd have worded it a bit more diplomatically if I realised it was going to
be public. This is not a dig at Chris, it was my stupid fault for not
noticing the CC.

As it was, it was a cheap quip about the whole situation. I had no clue
whether the commits were done by commiters or portmgr or anyone else. If
I'd even been thinking about it in a more formal way, I'd have researched
in more detail.

> At the same time portmgr@ often performs large infrastructure changes
> that require fixing hundreds and thousands of ports before landing
> them (no one likes when someone else breaks your port, right?). Each
> port added to the tree places a maintainership burden not only on an
> actual maintainer but also on portmgr@. This makes portmgr@ strive to
> eagerly remove ports that are standing in the way of big changes when
> their maintainers are lacking time to fix them. Unfortunately this
> makes portmgr@ look evil in the eyes of not only maintainers but also
> fellow committers.

I was just showing my surprise that so many ports were blasted at such
short notice. I was not attacking portmgr, or even generally any of the
people involved, just that this particular even surprised me.

It appears from subsequent emails that there is some internal politics going
on here.

I don't know Chris, or any of the committers. I just noticed a whole
loads of ports marked broken, that when I checked, were not broken,
so I sent a message to those concerned to inform them of the fact.
Hell, only one of those ports was actually one I was installing, and as
I already had the distfile, I could fix it for myself without bothering
to contact anyone. It didn't help me personally to point it out.

Jamie