status of FreeBSD ports you maintain as of 20090705

[Wesley Shields]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 11:52:03AM -0700, Charlie Kester wrote:
> On Tue 04 Aug 2009 at 09:21:07 PDT Diego Depaoli wrote:
> >2009/8/4 Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org>:
> >> Diego Depaoli wrote:
> >>> There are too many ports and too few people who care them.
> >>> IMHO the options are:
> >>> - decrease the number of ports
> >> We trim dead/useless ports all the time.
> >>> - increase the number of ?volunteers/committers/testers...
> >> This is the only valid answer for FreeBSD.
> >How? I think your following comment (even smiled) isn't the right
> >starting point.
> >
> >>> - switch to a multi-level solution (e.g. Archlinux).
> >> In DiegoBSD you should feel free to use any solution you think is
> >> useful. :)
> >Please look at
> >http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/134443
> >Ok, I agree,  is an useless port, but 3 months without further notices
> >are enough to demotivate any volunteer.

I've gone ahead and grabbed this PR. I will get to it when time permits
(I've currently got a lot on my plate so please be patient).

> I've been a maintainer since the beginning of this year, and I've yet to
> have any of my updates go unnoticed for that long.  I suspect that your
> PR is the exception rather than the rule.

I don't know if it's true or not but I certainly agree with you here.

> But it does suggest the need for more guidance on how maintainers can
> work effectively with the committers.  What can we do to help streamline
> the process? What sort of things create extra, unnecessary work for
> committers? 

Submitting PRs in the proper format and that need no extra work is the
best. Unfortunately knowing when an update is done is not something that
one intuitively knows; it comes with practice. Paying attention to what
you submitted compared to what got committed is a good way to find out
if you made any mistakes. Talking to the committers (we don't bite, I
promise) also helps. The IRC channels are documented on the wiki and are
a great source of getting help with things. Another great resource on
how to submit good PRs is the porter's handbook[1]. It covers a lot of
things in detail that can help your PR handled get handled quickly and
easily.

> If a PR doesn't get picked up within a week, it doesn't seem to be
> showing up on the committers' scans when they're looking for something
> to do.  Perhaps they should fix their scans, but perhaps the maintainer
> should post a message here, asking for someone to look at the PR?  I've
> seen messages like that in the past, and the response has always been
> that one of the committers volunteers to take care of it.

Yes, if a PR goes unclaimed for some period of time please feel free to
ask here for someone to take a look at it.

-- WXS

[1]: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/