On Oct 21, 2018, at 12:46, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> What I see in MacPorts is that, with the exception of a small number
> of critical ports (where breaking it would cause serious issues to
> lots of users), in most ports having the maintainer assigned is more
> of a responsibility and commitment to try to fix the reported issues
> (and communicate with upstream, to both report bugs and submit
> patches). I also often run "port livecheck maintainer:myusername" to
> see which ports I need to look into. If we remove the port maintainers
> completely, I will neither notice the bug reports nor know that I
> should have updated a port. (I would see those if we ever get back to
> having 100 tickets open as opposed to 5k.)
I agree with the above.
> And yes, we have a huge number of people assigned as maintainers who
> no longer maintain the ports. We really need to clean up the list in
> order to reflect the reality.
It is indeed a problem that we have many ports which claim to be maintained by
someone who does not do so. We should clarify for contributors, maybe by
rewriting the section of the guide, what being a maintainer means. We should
not pressure people into maintaining a port, just because they submitted it.
They should enter into the maintenance commitment voluntarily and with full
knowledge of what we expect from them in return. We should also do a better job
of pointing out that if someone is no longer able to maintain a port, they
should let us know as soon as possible, so that we can remove them; too many
people leave without telling us they're doing so.
