FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Mike Meyer]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:07:43 +0100
vermaden <vermaden at interia.pl> wrote:
> I got these maintainers email addresses from http://freshports.org
> page, are they up-to-date there? Maybe that is the problem and
> that my mails jest went to /dev/null ... Just checking for sure.

I dunno. If you want the maintainer as of your update of the ports
tree, go to the port and do "make -V MAINTAINER".

I've generally had good luck with ports. I ran for years with
LOCALBASE set to /usr/opt (what can I say, I was a masochist). I'd
regularly find ports that failed to build under those conditions. I'd
try and patch the port to fix it, or sometimes just kludge it to work,
then mail the maintainer with the patch. Most of them fixed things
pretty quickly. Ditto after the conversion to rc.d - I'd find ports
that needed such scripts, write them, and send them to the
maintainer. There, my patches weren't accepted as is quite so often,
but I generally saw an appropriate script (even if inferior to mine
:-) fairly quickly. And as a port maintainer, I tried to respond
quickly to such requests.

Getting patches accepted was a spottier story. It generally worked
better if I approached the maintainer with "I'd like to fix this/add
this feature, are you interested" than just submitting patches to
gnats.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/
Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information.

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