Can we please just remove the old Makefile headers?

[Julian H. Stacey]

Eitan Adler wrote:
> On 27 August 2012 08:40, Julian H. Stacey <jhs at berklix.com> wrote:
> >   On various other older ports, when I couldnt get response in time
> >   from MAINTAINER (I don't mean re hylafax), perhaps maintainer on
> >   holiday, & I couldn't wait for send-pr tiem out, & didnt want to
> >   invoke send-pr, I fell back succesfully, to contacting the Whom:
> >   creator, who while no longer regularly motivated to do maintenance,
> >   could respond without delay & give hints (fallback maintainer).
> 
> Which is exactly the reason we should get rid of the whom lines. The
> submitter is *not* a fallback maintainer,

No,
- eg, If MAINTAINER of hylafax had resigned I would have resumed maintenance.
- Creators of others ports have functioned as fallback if asked.
I guess its not an uncommon phenomena, a creator is happy someone
else maintains code, but doesnt want to see a port unsupported
if maintainer response might slip toward timeout & replacement.


> and some users mistakenly
> assume that the whom line is the maintainer.

If global edit is done, we could be more explicit than 
	"Whom:"
& change to eg
	"Creator (but see MAINTAINER below):"


> We should be encouraging
> users to mail ports at freebsd.org and possibly cc the maintainer if
> required.

Ports is high volume; one can get lost in traffic,
sometimes private mail is better, context dependent.


> >   Some ports are easy to create, eg my lang/pbasic, but some are
> >   hard, (eg I'd guess editors/openoffice-3 may have been, One might ask
> >         # Whom:                 Martin Blapp
> 
> The whom address might be bouncing, the person might be not be using
> FreeBSD anymore, or any of the like.

Alow deletion & update by send-pr


> >   Let ports creators retain their one line of credit.  Removing it
> >   would save little & be ungrateful, like removing names out of .c
> >   & .h.  (Some (inc. me) may like noticing in passing who created
> >   the ports one's working on)).  The credit may encourage some ports
> >   creators to struggle on, creating sometimes obdurate complex ports
> >   one might otherwise be tempted to give up on after a not-yet-port
> >   is just hand built & hand tested localy,
> 
> Interesting argument. But this implies that we should allow the whom
> line to be changed by "creator request"

I wasnt aware they were not changeable ?. 
I'd assumed it was free text comment, not auto generated ?

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultant, Munich http://berklix.com
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