upgrading a port with no maintainer

[James Berry]

On Jan 21, 2008, at 2:25 PM, Kevin Van Vechten wrote:

>
> On Jan 21, 2008, at 6:15 AM, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:
>
>>> Whatever happened to the "port submit" project initiative anyway?   
>>> Wasn't that supposed to come about for free with the remote  
>>> index? :-)
>>
>> 	Sure, it was! Remote Index would have brought that and many other  
>> goodies. Sadly enough, remote index was never implemented, so we  
>> don't have them at present :-( Hope somebody steps up in the not  
>> too distant future to start doing some of the leg work ;-)
>
> It was implemented, just never integrated ;)  All the sources are in  
> subversion, though probably suffering from bit-rot at this point.

Note that the some of this stuff is manifested in mpwa (look at http://db.macports.org 
), which uses a (heavilly) modified version of Kevin's submit code to  
submit changes to the db. A cron job runs every 20 minutes (and has  
been for about 10 months now) to autosubmit any ports that have been  
changed and checked into svn. In a better world, any joe blow could  
simply run "port submit" to submit changes to a port. That almost  
(maybe does?) work right now.

So mpwa can serve as the index, but we don't have any integration  
currently to query that index. Allowing generalized submission to mpwa  
would require a stronger implementation of user authentication and  
signing, which isn't too hard. Anyone interested should review the  
docs http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/users/jberry/mpwa/doc/.

I'd be happy to brainstorm, take criticism, answer questions, etc. The  
one thing I don't have right now, however, is the time to take this  
further just now (though I hope to in the indefinite and optimistic  
future). Others are welcome to pick this up, with appropriate  
discussion of course.

James