Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 12:51:42 -0500 From: linimon@lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) To: Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>, 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: <20050728175142.GA11503@soaustin.net> In-Reply-To: <20050728172249.GD66015@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> <20050728170401.GA9534@soaustin.net> <20050728172249.GD66015@isis.sigpipe.cz>
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On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 07:22:49PM +0200, Roman Neuhauser wrote: > I am a member of the mythical "users" group, and I don't mind fixing > whatever breakage I stumble upon as I go. And many users are in that same situation and that's fine; but many others are either unwilling or lack the skills to do so. See the GNATS DB for many examples. If things don't work for them, they're stuck. > Would it be better if there were 9611 ports instead? If they all worked -- yes! > How about "maintained" ports where the maintainers don't take proper > care of their ports? That's why we have that policy (there's that word again) that maintainers who don't maintain their ports after 3 months can have their ports reassigned. People have been reluctant to do that because the maintainers are also volunteers and we try to respect their feelings (see below). > I just don't see how no "designated maintainer" makes a port worse > than port "maintained" by someone who refutes quite a bit of PRs > with "I don't know, I only use minor part of the software, and > that's all I can keep running". At least someone is looking after it in the latter case; there is someone the users can ask questions of, even if the answer is "I don't know". It is not an ideal situation, but it is a better situation than having noone. > FMPOV the situation is "mostly working" vs none. Most users don't expect "mostly working". They look at this list, see that they can install something from it, and then get aggravated when they find out they've wasted their time trying to use it. > I've sent quite a few patches to various ports since I've started > using FreeBSD, and my experience is that maintained ports > (especially those "maintained" by certain @freebsd.org addresses) > are more likely to have PRs hanging for a long time. The situation > is a bit <irony>better</irony> with ports maintained by people > without a @freebsd.org address, because committers usually don't > bother waiting for approval. This is like saying that one bad situation justifies another. This is not good logic. It's an unpopular thing to try to hold ports maintainers accountable for actually maintaining their ports -- especially in the cases of FreeBSD committers, who IMHO ought to be held to a higher standard, since they've already gone through a process which has shown that they are willing to accept responsibility for work that they do on the project. This work does go on and it's behind the scenes and best done while wearing asbestos garb. Since everyone working on ports if a volunteer, we have no effective means of forcing anyone to do anything. Gentle reminders and requests are the best methods (again IMHO) to try to fix these problems. In any case, I believe that there are only a handful of maintainers that fall into this category. Spend an hour looking at portsmon's various pages and I think you'll come to the same conclusion. Again, I don't see how the idea that some maintainers don't maintain their ports means that we should not bother to try to get ports assigned to responsible people who will actively maintain them. mcl
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