Am I opening tickets improperly

[Glen Whitney]

Dear MacPorts developers,

    I just wanted to make sure I've been opening tickets properly, since 
a few have not been getting feedback.  That could easily be because you 
are busy with other aspects of MacPorts, not to mention the rest of your 
lives, but I thought I should just make sure.  All of my tickets (except 
1 against trac) are against the base, and so following the TracTicketing 
page on the wiki, I've labeled them with version numbers like 
base-1.4.40, just me in cc: (since "port info base" does not refer to 
the base, there was no email address to use for maintainer), and the 
base component.  Are there folks that scan all the recent tickets 
against base?

    I ask because one of the bugs seems quite serious to me, Ticket 
#11920 (https://svn.macosforge.org/projects/macports/ticket/11920). This 
bug can cause a port built with the wrong variants turned on to be 
silently installed.  An occurrence of this caused me significant 
consternation. It was pretty hard to track down, since it was installing 
the image _called_ emacs_devel 21.0.97+x11, and it took a long time to 
occur to me that that image had been compiled with -x11 (!).  Anyhow, 
even though the symptoms can be pretty serious, the fix turns out not to 
be hard.   But I have had the ticket with patch posted for a week 
without any comment.  I tried to guess at the highest priority, I chose 
"Blocker", but apparently I guessed wrong.  I'd just like to spare 
someone else the confusion I went through, and so I'm wondering if 
there's anything else I can do to help resolve this issue.

    I also have 4 other tickets open against base, all of which I've 
submitted patches for.  Ticket #11892 got marked "needs developer 
review" after I mentioned it on this list a week or so ago.  Ticket 
#11898 just needs a 1-word documentation fix to be resolved, the man 
page was ambiguous as someone (pipping?) pointed out in the ticket but 
it doesn't seem to have been visited again to make the fix.   Ticket 
#11891 I just mentioned in my previous note.     And ticket #11897, like 
11920, has gotten no response.  It's not anywhere near as serious,  but 
it also has a much more trivial fix.

    My main project is to get a set of ports together which will allow 
compiling gtk apps with the new non-X11 port of gtk purely on top of 
quartz, with GnuCash as the main objective (since I've switched to using 
the quartz GnuCash myself and don't want to have to update it by hand).
That project is hard to work on with these outstanding issues. On the 
other hand, coding is very active on macports base, so I've been left 
updating the patches to the latest SVN every several days, which doesn't 
feel so productive. At the moment, all the patches are current up to r25303.

    Thanks for any advice on anything else I can do to help ease the 
resolution of these issues.  I realize this is a volunteer, 
open-software effort and I've tried to provide evidence that I'm ready 
to do my appropriate bit and not be a free rider.  Does base need a test 
harness to vet patches and avoid issues like the recent reinplace bug? 
Is that something I might be able to contribute that could help get 
patches in more quickly in the future?  I'd offer to put in time as a 
ticket-resolver, but obviously I haven't yet built the reputation/trust 
that would lead to the granting of such a role.  I do plan in the next 
couple of days to submit a patch for ticket #8221 that someone else 
opened, it's pretty clear how to do it now that #11891 is out of the 
way.  Perhaps that will also help.

    Best regards, and my thanks to everyone for all of the work that has 
gone into MacPorts.

     Glen Whitney