Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:33:16 -0500 From: Tom McLaughlin <tmclaugh@sdf.lonestar.org> To: Peter Beckman <beckman@purplecow.com> Cc: ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Audacity needs a loving family Message-ID: <1172349196.1809.72.camel@localhost> In-Reply-To: <20070224083652.L53742@thermonuclear.org> References: <20070224023538.GC34523@nowhere> <20070224083652.L53742@thermonuclear.org>
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On Sat, 2007-02-24 at 08:41 -0500, Peter Beckman wrote: > On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Craig Boston wrote: <snip> > > I'm not interested in maintainership of Audacity, but your post did bring > up a thought. > > I think it would make sense to have a wiki for maintainers where they can > keep notes, documentation and special circumstances information about > ports. Add links to the definitive source of the code, a short history, > a link to the CVS/SVN repository changelog, and as Craig mentioned above a > listing of "a few issues ... that need to be kept in mind." This way even > if Craig got hit by a beer truck (God forbid), the knowledge Craig gained > during his maintainership would live on. One section per port, and ports > could link to eachother (dependencies). > Most of this information can be obtained already from cvs logs if people take the time to write informative PR descriptions (and we take the time to make informative commit messages). I typically cut and paste the relevant lines from an app's included ChangeLog into commit messages as well as my own notes now. I can then use freshports or `cvs log` to look at my port's history as can anyone else and get a pretty good idea of what's gone on over time. I think many other ports committers simply cut and paste PR descriptions as commit messages too. There are some things that are harder to keep track of through cvs logs like known issues but I don't see anything wrong with maintainers adding a "known issues" section to a port's pkg-descr. They can even add an "RCS:" line to it with a link to the site's code repo if they want. There are some other alternatives of course. In the OpenBSD ports tree maintainers often write their own README or README.OpenBSD for their ports. These files are typically open ended and include whatever info the maintainer deems relevant. Gentoo uses a ChangeLog file in portage for each app. This is in part because each program version has its own ebuild file so change history is not preserved across program versions by the ebuild file. Maybe people might find the addition of an optional README.FreeBSD or ChangeLog file useful as a coherent record of the port and maintainer's work? tom <snip> -- | tmclaugh at sdf.lonestar.org tmclaugh at FreeBSD.org | | FreeBSD http://www.FreeBSD.org | | BSD# http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:FreeBSD |
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