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Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2006 11:17:19 -0600
To: "Charles A. Landemaine" <landemaine@gmail.com>
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From: linimon@lonesome.com (Mark Linimon)
Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Who is behind the ports?
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On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 11:34:54AM -0300, Charles A. Landemaine wrote:
> How is it possible?

We don't know, exactly :-)

I wrote a paper recently (the formatting won't be right, but nevertheless ...)
http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/ports_overview .  It has all the citations
you need at the bottom, including "Contributing to the FreeBSD Ports
Collection."

> How many people are helping porting applications?

It looks like we have around 1400 maintainers.  Other people help by
submitting PRs.
 
> Is there some sort of automation creating so many ports?

Creating them is still more an 'art' than a 'science'.  However, there's
some automation to watch them as they go by:

 - FreshPorts (www.freshports.org) is oriented towards users and port
   maintainers, and offers browsable overviews of much interesting data.
   You can also subscribe to it by email.

 - portsmon (portsmon.freebsd.org), which I wrote, is more oriented towards
   ports committers, and focuses more on build errors and problem reports.
   It pushes out certain reports by email, to maintainers and ports@.

mcl