Date: Wed, 10 May 2017 11:43:51 +0000 From: Natasha Kerensikova <natbsd@instinctive.eu> To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Ada and GNAT maintainership proposition Message-ID: <20170510114351.GA61453@nat.rebma.instinctive.eu>
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Hello, I'm an insignificant FreeBSD user and Ada developer, and over the years I've come to rely a lot of both technologies together. I'm very worried now that I discovered that Ada-related ports no longer have a maintainer. Having thought a lot about it in the past day, I don't have a workable exit strategy for either technology, and I don't want to need one. So the whole point of this e-mail is, what happens now? As far as I can tell, if nobody steps up to take over the maintainership, the ports will eventually be considered dead and be removed. I think I saw ports stay maintainerless for a long while before being dropped, but here we have a lively compiler and a moving standard, so it's likely things will break sooner rather than later. Once a port is broken, even if it's not reported as broken, its days of maintainerless existence are numbered. So, does anyone care? I do, but I mean, besides me? Is there anybody ready to step up and take maintainership and ensure these ports continue to work? (If there is, don't read the rest of the e-mail, it's moot.) I'm afraid there isn't anybody, and that's why I'm asking here whether I can be that somebody. It would be nice there was some way to make an official distinction between standard maintainership and maintainership-by-default-because-I- want-it-to-work-but-I-would-gladly-hand-it-to-anyone-interested. The problem is that Marino's shoes are difficult to fill. I'm basically applying for a position while I have no experience (I only compiled gcc three times in my life), no relevant skill (except reading C), and almost no time. The only thing preventing me from being the most ill-suited person for the role is that I care. Is it enough? I'm used to imposter's syndrome, but taking for example the recent thread https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2017-April/108130.html that's already way beyond my league. On top of that, I'm only running recent -RELEASE, I'm not sure I can find a box on which to run -CURRENT, and I don't hope having some -STABLE or older -RELEASE available. That limits quite a bit my testing capabilities. I think I can handle the load of being the contact person for these ports and dealing with the bugtracker and things like that. So if there is anyone reading this with a bit of technical expertise to help but who doesn't want to deal with the communication part of the maintainership, please let me know, so I can volunteer less shakily. So at this point, is there anybody to talk me out of trying to maintain gcc-aux and some of the Ada ports left behind? What is the procedure to ask for maintainership on these? I still haven't fully sketched the exact list of package I would try to claim, but I use daily lang/gcc6-aux, www/aws, devel/florist-gpl, and devel/gprbuild; I occasionally use devel/adacurses and devel/gnatcoll; and I could easy integrate into my workflow lang/adacontrol and lang/asis. I would take some more, going out of my way to test them, but I'll have to think about which ones are within my reach. The gnatdroid and gnatcross ones are almost certainly not. Thanks for your patience, Natasha
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