about the idleness of some port maintainers

[Bjoern Koenig]

Hello,

isn't there a emergency plan in case of unreachable port maintainers?

For example: print/acroread7 is broken for more than two weeks, there is 
a good patch in the PR database and nobody does anything; just waiting 
for the maintainer which didn't respond to emails for a month.

This is not an individual case. I noticed this idleness with other port 
maintainers too. I know that most people are very busy in their real 
life and FreeBSD is just a secondary concern, but on the other hand this 
makes ports very inflexible.

What do you think about explicit guide lines to let people with commit 
privileges override the maintainer's prerogative of approving port 
updates. Such guide lines might say that critical or unbreaking patches 
are allowed to be commited after one or two weeks or even earlier if the 
maintainer didn't respond to previous invocations. I saw also minor 
addenda to certain ports in the PR database which are very useful but 
waste away due to unreachable maintainers.

Regards
Björn