> Do you already have commit access to the repository?

No, and it is not clear that I should be the one with such access for ESO. This 
is something we have to decide here at ESO first.


> If not I can act as a sponsor for those packages, until you get it.
> 
> My duty cycle will be more in the range of a couple of days for packages
> that I don't know yet (I'd be responsible for any damage they would
> cause), and approx one day or less for small updates on packages that I
> know already.

Thank you for volunteering. I fear that a couple of days may be a bit too long 
for a number of our astronomers at the moment. This will have to be discussed 
by us to see how to proceed. We have about 108 Portfiles in our repository and 
this number will grow as new instruments and their associated data processing 
software comes online. Unfortunately, experience has also shown that a fair 
amount of understanding of the ESO source code packages for the 19 different 
instruments is required to correctly build the software. What I mean by 
correct, is not just that the software compiles and runs, but that is does not 
introduce any nasty artefacts into the scientific results. This is actually a 
big motivator for us at ESO to take on the responsibility of binary packaging 
the ESO software for our astronomers, rather than them doing it by themselves.
If you take responsibility for maintaining our Portfiles in the default 
MacPorts repository, how would you propose the update procedure to work? Would 
you only update with the patches we deliver? If you or one of the other core 
maintainers has to make a change independently, how would this be validated for 
quality assurance?

However, with that all said, there certainly are one or two Portfiles that are 
actually 3rd party library dependencies for our software (e.g. py-photutils) or 
are less critical. These could be the first good candidates to consider moving 
over to the default repository.


> For the record, all the ESO packages are being packaged by volunteers in
> Debian, and I already maintain packages will small userbase,
> concentrated among astronomers.

I know about those packages. Unfortunately many of our users also do not 
regularly use those packages, since they tend to be out of date, which has a 
negative impact on the quality of scientific analyses. The RPM repositories 
also do not deliver our full data processing stack. We are actually in the 
process of preparing full YUM and APT repositories of our software for the ESO 
instruments. There again, we will have to see and negotiate with the respective 
communities if it makes sense to migrate any of that to the Fedora or Debian 
repositories.

Kind regards.

Artur
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