Sunday, May 01, 2022

Re: [ports discussion] enforcing maintainership?

I think that, for one port that I'm maintainer or, there are probably 10+
ports I originated/did major changes on.

One thing Solene is right about: what does port maintainership means ?

It means there's one person who cares deeply enough about the port that
he's going to keep it (more or less) up-to-date and will be the go-to person
for changes to that port.

As it stands, I don't think "multi-maintainer" ports are a solution.

I also don't think keeping everything squeaky up-to-date is the solution
either.

And finally (surprise!) I don't think that removing ports without recent
activity is the solution either.

The way Unix works, we got 5000+ ports that don't need much activity nor
maintainership. Some of them might be somewhat out-of-date but this doesn't
have huge implications, security-wise.

The remaining 5000 split among stuff that's trivial to maintain (meaning:
it's in good enough shape/portable enough that an update can be done by anyone)
and stuff that's trickier.

I think the main goal we should have is to get more people on-board.

Face it: we are lagging behind badly when it comes to gettin more ports aboard.


Yeah, there's the question of quality and all that.

Let me wonder a bit.

We've got all kinds of tools to catch bad mistakes these days.

What's wrong with opening the Ivory Tower a wee little bit more and getting
more ports people ?

Newcomers may make mistakes.

We got more tools to catch those mistakes. And we need tooling for that.

More people to work with -> more time to work on stuff that needs working on.

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