On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 11:42:08AM -0600, joshua stein wrote: > Using CVS and dealing with tarballs is probably pretty > ancient-feeling for many outsiders. I don't know that more > documentation is really the problem. > > I personally tend to ignore most ports@ emails that aren't diffs I > can easily view in my e-mail client because it's a hassle to save > the attachment, tar -t it to see what its directory structure is, > untar it in the proper place, try to build it, then provide feedback > by copying parts of the Makefile to an e-mail or doing some other > work to produce a diff.
I never understood why new ports have to submitted as a tarball. Why not accept new ports as a diff which only creates new files? It is trivial to create such a diff. Well, CVS makes it somewhat non-trivial for people without write access to the main repository, but not impossible. You could pkg_add cvsutils and use cvsdo add to make new files and directories appear (I have done this before, it works). Or you could add new directories against a local repository mirror and produce a diff against it. And of course there is the Git conversion on github. With a Git repository it is very trivial to create a diff which adds a new port. I don't think we would even need to explain how. People who become curious about OpenBSD development today will very likely already be comfortable with Git. Allowing pull requests has the downside that the mailing list cannot easily respond to what is going on at Github. Splitting the conversation across two disparate communiation channels won't work very well. Github tends to assume that it is the only place where all the action is.
