From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Nov 12 19:17:18 2003 Return-Path: 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 8231216A4CE for ; Wed, 12 Nov 2003 19:17:18 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.blarg.net (zoot.blarg.net [206.124.128.9]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E8A8F43FA3 for ; Wed, 12 Nov 2003 19:17:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from abowhill@blarg.net) Received: from io (vp071.dmp02.sea.blarg.net [206.124.131.71]) by mail.blarg.net (Postfix) with SMTP id 579FE34297; Wed, 12 Nov 2003 19:15:54 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <000f01c3a994$98e42b90$0200000a@io> From: "Allan Bowhill" To: Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 19:16:53 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 cc: kris@obsecurity.org Subject: Re: Ability for maintainers to update own ports X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 03:17:18 -0000 X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 03:17:18 -0000 >> The first can be satisfied with something like pkgsrc-wip, and I always >> wondered why we don't have a ports-FRESH and ports-TESTED, like we have >> -CURRENT and -STABLE. >Because even with a single, unbranched ports collection, committers >can't keep it in working order without significant ongoing effort. On >average, several ports become broken on one of the supported >architectures and versions, *each day*. That's not counting the >periodic "cataclysmic events" where hundreds of ports become broken >due to e.g. a change in -current, and not counting errors introduced >in the course of development work on the ports collection >architecture. All the more reason to allow commit access to maintainers of leaf-node ports (ports that do not serve as dependencies to others, particularly multiple ports). How many of these packages are there - about 8000 to 9000? Wouldn't that take a load off committers? Ports that are dependencies of others have a greater need to be kept stable. How many are there - 1000? Just keeping that stabilized sounds like too big a task for committers anyway. >If you start adding more branches to the ports collection, you're >going to multiply the possible failure modes, and the net result will >be that the number of errors accumulating in the ports collection will >more than multiply. If maintainers had access to commit, they could more quickly respond to broken ports. But unless some kind of special tools are made available to allow almost-public access to commit leaf-node ports, they will just sit there in gnats. Maybe a FreeBSD 3rd party developers portal could be created, like "PortsForge" where maintainers and contributor wannabes could polish-up their work and commit it without burdening Gnats. Ports Committers could just scout the site for likely inclusions if they are looking form something new to bring into the official ports tree. --Allan