Anyone watching the bugtracker ?

[Mark Duling]

Jann Röder <roederja at student.ethz.ch> on Saturday, February 10, 2007 at
9:48 AM -0800 wrote:
>I'm wondering what the policy regarding updated ports / new ports and 
>other patches on the bugtracker is. It seems to me that if you don't 
>bother anyone with commit rights about commiting your update/new port it 
>will never be put in the ports tree. There appear to be countless 
>(valid) tickets that nobody even commented on. This seems a bit 
>discouraging for new contributers. I don't want to accuse anyone, I just 
>thought it might be good to bring up this topic.

The process leaves a lot to be desired, but things have actually improved
in the last year. Things may not be as bad as they appear, and I think
"countless" is exaggerated.  You must realize that:

1) Anyone can create a ticket for any reason, however trivial and
esoteric, and many bugs are filed against ports that are little used or
even not at all.

2) People are reluctant to close bugs unless it is confirmed that a fix
works, and also when port submissions are made that are invalid and the
author never responds to requests for changes.

So the ticket list is part bug tracker and part community bulletin board
system.  For these reasons, I think the basic and unstated rule of thumb
is, or should be, that people submitting updates and new ports should get
top priority.  And the for bugs that are being reported with no solution
indicated in the ticket, there is no other way but to let them sit there
until someone who knows how to fix it does so or someone discovers how to.
 Some port submissions that are pending responses from authors that will
never come, and some tickets will never get fixed and the applications
will never be updated and the port will eventually have to be deleted. 
Until then they take up a ticket and there isn't much we can do.  If there
was a way to file bugs under some
minimal-impact-can't-be-fixed-and-it-probably-doesn't-matter-anyway
category and we'd shed a lot of tickets from the open ticket list and it'd
look a lot better.  But we just have a big list right now.

So for better or worse, pinging the mailing list once in awhile is one way
for people to help us figure out what tickets are actionable, because it
can be hard to tell sometimes.  We need more people doing due diligence on
the tickets list (who don't need to be highly technical), scanning for
developer patches, contacting developers, etc.  But the factors I
mentioned may always be with us.

Mark