Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 12:04:01 -0500 From: linimon@lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) To: Simon Barner <barner@FreeBSD.org>, Paul Schmehl <pauls@utdallas.edu>, ports@freebsd.org, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> Subject: Re: New port with maintainer ports@FreeBSD.org [was: Question about maintainers] Message-ID: <20050728170401.GA9534@soaustin.net> In-Reply-To: <20050728164111.GA66015@isis.sigpipe.cz> References: <C3B81AFDB8A5DFB5AB566CC4@utd59514.utdallas.edu> <42E81050.7090305@cs.tu-berlin.de> <66A226C3557B48ED535E3FED@utd59514.utdallas.edu> <20050727230523.GB54954@isis.sigpipe.cz> <20050728154248.GA943@zi025.glhnet.mhn.de> <20050728164111.GA66015@isis.sigpipe.cz>
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On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 06:41:11PM +0200, Roman Neuhauser wrote:
> The policy makers won, everybody else lost.
You're entitled to your opinion, but from the other side of the table
it looks like this:
What Kris and I see are hundreds of ports that are committed and then
either a) are never updated, b) wind up not compiling when the base
system is updated, c) wind up with PRs filed against them by users, for
other problems ("doesn't work with XYZ"), that no one will ever deal with.
In every case the users who install those ports aren't getting what they
expect.
How does this situation serve the users?
Let me mention today's statistics:
Total number of ports: 13281
Number of ports with no maintainer: 3670 (27.6%)
I just can't see how this is a good situation.
I no longer have the statistics online but from the last time I went
through this it is about twice more likely that an unmaintained port:
- has PRs against it
- is broken
- is out-of-date
as versus the average maintained port. (Of course, some maintainers
are far more active than others.)
And yes, it's true that he and I do the majority of the cleanup work to
flag and (if necessary) remove broken ports and so tend to be sensitive
to the issue. But the idea that we have is that it's better to have a
working port than a useless port.
People need to decide what their vision of the Ports Collection is.
Some folks seem to want every possible port included, whether or not
it is up to date and working. I have, in particular, been trying to
push us towards the direction of only having ports that we are going
to use and maintain in it, on the theory that anything else is at some
point going to waste some user's time somewhere down the road.
mcl
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