[FreeBSD-Announce] Volunteers needed to help maintain ports

[Kris Kennaway]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 03:39:49PM +0400, Dmitry Marakasov wrote:
> * Kris Kennaway (kris at obsecurity.org) wrote:
> > Many of you no doubt make use of the FreeBSD Ports Collection for
> > installing and managing third-party software.  What you may not know
> > is that a lot of the ports in the Ports Collection have no assigned
> > maintainer.  Unmaintained ports tend to lag behind the rest of the
> > Ports Collection in the speed of updates to new versions, and in the
> > overall quality of the port.  With nearly 15000 third-party
> > applications in the Ports Collection, and dozens more added every week,
> > there is an ever-present need for more volunteers to assist in
> > maintaining ports.

> 1) Software no longer developed. New versions are released very
> rarely, if ever released. Do these actually need a maintainer?
> I see high probability of situation like this:
> - Someone answers the call and adopts the port
> - ...time passes...
> - Maintainer becomes unreachable, and even if someone sends an update,
>   we'll have to wait for `maintainer timeout', and then reset the
>   maintainer again.

This is still better than:

...no-one adopts the port
...port becomes broken due to other changes
...no-one fixes the port
...kris has to mark it and 500 other ports BROKEN

:-)

The point of having a maintainer is to share the workload; they can
either fix the problem, report it upstream and import a fix, or mark
the port broken themselves.  Inactive maintainers are a problem, but
we have a well-defined procedure for removing them; the solution is
not to say "we should try to avoid letting people maintain ports, in
case they become inactive in the future".

> 2) Software with new versions released frequently. The port has no
> maintainer, but still it's updated by `by-passers' regularly, so it's
> at latest version.

But when someone does a drive-by update and there are problems with it
(e.g. doesn't compile on all supported configurations, causes problems
for other ports, or just doesn't work properly), the users have no
point of contact because they're directed to the mailing list.
Furthermore, offten the original submitter closes their eyes and
pretends that such problems are not their responsibility, because they
were not expecting to have to do any work to follow up on their "quick
and easy" update.

> Also, we might explicitly ask people who update unmaintained ports to
> become maintainers of these.

Yes, we should ask them.

Kris
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