Has the port collection become to large to handle.

[James O'Gorman]

fbsd wrote:
> Spadge wrote:
>> Because they don't. The port maintainer is trusted to maintain the 
>> port ... and then a bunch of people are trusted to audit the ports
>> before the update is allowed in to the ports tree.
>> 
>> Or at least, that's how I thought it worked.
> 
> ********* so working with in that same procedure the maintainer 
> passes the packages to the audit people and they pass it on. No
> problem with this at all.

Question: How would you handle this for the ~4000 ports that are
unmaintained? (MAINTAINER set to ports at FreeBSD.org)

Or similarly, for when someone who isn't the maintainer of a port
submits an update? This person is then no longer the "trusted
maintainer", as you put it.

[snip]
>> Also, I think the idea of having a central database to monitor
>> which ports are used has privacy issues, which will require every
>> port to have a privacy disclaimer and an opt-out option. So much
>> for streamlining.
> 
> ******** There is no privacy issues. Passing cookies is normal and 
> done as matter of fact by most commercial websites and any website 
> that uses php session control makes cookies by default. This is a
> no-issue issue.

Perhaps a better suggestion for this would be a similar approach to what
I believe the Debian project did - the Debian Popularity Contest. They
created a package which, when installed setup a cronjob to anonymously
email the developers periodically statistics about your installed
packages. This then makes it "opt-in", rather than mandatory. However,
as someone said earlier, unless a significant number of people were to
use this the statistics collected would be next to useless.

But in any case, are the misc/instant-workstation and
misc/instant-server ports not sufficient for this sort of thing? They
are simply meta-ports which "depend" on ports common to their respective
tasks.

James