From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Thu May 25 11:38:46 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1CD3E16A41F for ; Thu, 25 May 2006 11:38:46 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from amdmi3@mail.ru) Received: from mx6.mail.ru (mx6.mail.ru [194.67.23.26]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 98F1543D48 for ; Thu, 25 May 2006 11:38:45 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from amdmi3@mail.ru) Received: from [213.148.29.33] (port=4232 helo=nexii.panopticon) by mx6.mail.ru with esmtp id 1FjEAu-000L7L-00; Thu, 25 May 2006 15:38:44 +0400 Received: from hades.panopticon (hades.panopticon [192.168.0.2]) by nexii.panopticon (Postfix) with ESMTP id E875711439; Thu, 25 May 2006 15:43:02 +0400 (MSD) Received: by hades.panopticon (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 1A8642A1; Thu, 25 May 2006 15:39:49 +0400 (MSD) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 15:39:49 +0400 From: Dmitry Marakasov To: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org Message-ID: <20060525113949.GA14925@hades.panopticon> Mail-Followup-To: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org, Kris Kennaway , Shaun Amott References: <20060524233036.GA91627@xor.obsecurity.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20060524233036.GA91627@xor.obsecurity.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Cc: Shaun Amott , Kris Kennaway Subject: Re: [FreeBSD-Announce] Volunteers needed to help maintain ports X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 11:38:46 -0000 * Kris Kennaway (kris@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. I think that there's no much reason to panic about large quantity of ports without maintainer. I have more that 500 ports installed, and among ports that have no maintainer, almost every port is at it's latest version. What are unmaintained ports? I can divide these into 3 categories: 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. 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. 3) Ports that actually need a maintainer. This is small percentage of currently `unmaintained' ports. I think most of these are in specific categories like biology, science, finance. My opinion is that we don't need every port without maintainer adopted by someone, as this will not do any good and may even harm. But, we need maintainers for unmaintained ports which: - are currently outdated (i.e. newer vesion of software was released) - have PR's, compile problems or are BROKEN Also, we might explicitly ask people who update unmaintained ports to become maintainers of these. By the way, for determining currently outdated ports, we need something like Edwin's `New ports distfiles checker'. It was located here: http://edwin.adsl.barnet.com.au/~edwin/ports/, but now it seems to be dead. I've risen that topic in March. Edwin said then that there were problems with sqlite (which seem to be fixed now), and Shaun Amott offered to run similar service. I think this topic has to be risen again - such service will be of great help in keeping ports up to date and seeking maintainers for ports that are really in need of one. -- Best regards, Dmitry mailto:amdmi3@mail.ru