sysutils/diskcheckd needs fixing and a maintainer

[Chris Rees]

On 20 August 2011 05:47,  <perryh at pluto.rain.com> wrote:
> I've been running it for a little less than
> two days now, on a drive which contains a gmirror, and have yet
> to see it misbehave.  (The HDD indicator does stay on, but this is
> not surprising given that, as noted above, diskcheckd is expected
> to run continuously.)

Thank you very much for taking the time to investigate.

>> > Do we need a "think twice before adding a port" habit?
>>
>> Yes. Of course, these aren't pointless ports however; while
>> still developed and maintained they were once useful.
>
> IIUC, diskcheckd started out in base and was later moved to ports
> (for reasons that are not obvious).  I can't see that it is any
> less useful now than when first developed, or when moved from base
> to ports.
>
>> It's time to go when they break and bitrot.
>
> For some definition of "break and bitrot."  Again, I haven't
> seen any actual breakage.  diskcheckd could use a little tweaking,
> e.g. diskcheckd.conf.sample contains a stale reference to "the
> diskcheckd.conf(5) manual page" which was presumably missed when
> diskcheckd was moved to ports; it should now be "the diskcheckd(8)
> manual page".
>
> BTW how does one go about fixing a FreeBSD-native port like this?
> Since we are the upstream, it would make more sense to revise the
> distfile than to add a patch in the port.  I didn't find any mention
> of this in the Porter's Handbook.
>

This is an unusual case where the sources are kept in the files/
subdir of the port's directory-- nowadays we'd put it in a separate
distfile. However, for this case please feel free to submit a diff to
the sources there and they can stay as long as the port remains
useful.

If you can't reproduce the problem I'll ask the submitter of
ports/143566 if he still can.

Is it logging to syslog?

Also, would you be happy to take maintainership of this port?

Chris

-- 
Chris Rees          | FreeBSD Developer
crees at FreeBSD.org   | http://people.freebsd.org/~crees