Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 03:28:31 -0800 From: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) To: jkh@time.cdrom.com Cc: hsu@clinet.fi, ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: xemacs 19.13 diffs - will someone commit them under my name? Message-ID: <199512061128.DAA06707@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU> In-Reply-To: <12424.818159352@time.cdrom.com> (jkh@time.cdrom.com)
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* We don't need big brother - big brother is frequently asleep or buried
* in exams anyway.
Gee thanks. ;)
* We need better brother. We need to extend the ports
* mechanism so that *more state* is kept with each port. We have a
* MAINTAINER field, for example, but it only tracks *our* maintainer!
* What if you want to get in touch with the original source? The
* computer is supposed to be our helper here, so make IT deal with
* figuring out how to send patches back to maintainers! I'm perfectly
* serious. I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to run a script over
* the ports collection to bundle up mail messages (which I would of
* course review before sending) to each of the *original* maintainers
* consisting of a short explanatory message and a shar file of the
* patches still required by FreeBSD. Run the script every couple of
* months and keep stats on whether or not the number of patch files in
* the tree grows or shrinks so you'll know whether or not it's working.
I'm not sure if this (someone other than porter sending diffs to
original author) is a good idea. (Adding an OWNER or whatever for
original author is fine.)
(1) Not all the patches are appropriate to be sent to authors. For
instance, there are many ports that have gone through a massize
re-orginization (libexec, etc.) to convert to the FreeBSD
paradigm, and those changes will just be met with a "huh?"
response.
(2) Some patches are done with coexistence with other platforms in
mind. For instance, there are a lot of ports that just comment
out something without adding "ifndef __FreeBSD__" or whatever.
Although that we can argue that it is a lousy porting job, I
really don't think we should blame the porters who've been putting
their work into this, and it works for us, which is probably good
enough for most of the people.
In short, only the porter, or a very careful observer of the port,
knows if the patch is appropriate to be sent to the author. I sure
don't have time to look at everything this automatic mail-writing
daemon is going to generate, so if someone else doesn't volunteer to
look at them, I don't think it's going to work. In the worst case,
we'll just annoy the authors (I mean if we send out mails without
checking them carefully).
* The answer is not in more draconian policies, it's in working
* *smarter*.
Indeed. But I really don't think it's THAT bad that people don't send
back patches to authors, the beauty of the current ports collection is
that usually, upgrading will just work with the old set of patches.
And many of the times it fails, it is becuase they have added FreeBSD
support with a different patch. :)
I would like to reiterate that it will indeed be nice if all the
patches in the ports collection disappear and everything in the world
compiles for FreeBSD out-of-the box, and encourage everyone (either
the original porter, or some careful observer, like Ollivier is doing
for ssh) to send mail to the original author of the changes we made.
But I don't think we should tighten our ropes for making a new port.
I've been trying to make it easier for a new porter to join our club
(that's why I go in and change every one of ache's Makefiles -- so
that all the Makefiles look the same :), and am against any attempt to
do otherwise.
The Big Brother
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