Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 23:13:11 -0600 From: Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com> To: Clement Laforet <sheepkiller@cultdeadsheep.org> Cc: ports@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: [DRAFT] ports contributor's guide Message-ID: <3FD013E7.7080302@lonesome.com> In-Reply-To: <20031205025342.04faf48b.sheepkiller@cultdeadsheep.org> References: <20031205025342.04faf48b.sheepkiller@cultdeadsheep.org>
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My main puzzlement over this (after agreeing with most of it) is that it's kind of a surprise to me to see the emphasis on not using the PR database for the first bug report. Now, clearly, sending in a PR without Cc:ing the maintainer is kind of rude (although everybody does it -- I've done this as well), but it does seem to me that since GNATS is the "one true place" to go to look for bug reports, that we ought to use it as such. In particular, if we only send bug reports to the maintainers first, how is someone who finds a bug to know whether it has already been sent to the maintainer or not? And if it has, how can they get a copy of the proposed patch (if any) to try it for themselves to see how it works? So I'm not really sure I can agree with this part of the document, but I'm open to discussion. (I should also mention that I have the ability to send email to mainainers who are not committers, reminding them of existing PRs in case they have forgotten, or especially, were not Cc:ed in the first place. It got a pretty good response the last time I ran it). The other thing that I wanted to put in the Porter's Handbook but got reviewed negatively at the time is a section on "ask whether FreeBSD really needs this port". There is a cost of infrastructure time and people's QA time to keep the ports framework workable, and just because someone's got a Sourceforge project doesn't necessarily mean that FreeBSD necessarily ought to have it in there. (Basically, I want the test to be "do you think it's going to be useful to someone else?") At that same time, I also got a poor reception to my idea suggesting that if a submitter of a new port wasn't willing to be the maintainer, then perhaps we should think twice about putting the port in as well. My overall statistics page actually shows a current number and percentage for the unmaintained ports (I prefer this to "orphaned" myself :-) ) and right now those numbers are 2572 (26.4%). I only once did the statistic of how much more likely an unmaintained port is to be be broken than a maintained one, but it was on the order or 40% more likely. Amazing what you can do with databases :-) mcl
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