The Guide - again

[C. Florian Ebeling]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Daniel J. Luke <dluke at geeklair.net> wrote:
> But how about a future where things are somewhat different:
>
> - Portfiles are stored remotely
> - Portfiles can be submitted by anyone and submitting a portfile
> automatically causes a build farm to attempt to build a package (failures
> are noted automatically and portfiles are marked as having built
> successfully or not)
> - Portfiles are optionally tagged by trusted users (committers?) after
> review
> - Portfiles are optionally tagged by end-users if they work (or if they
> don't work).
>
> The end-user can then decide to have a port tree available that's similar to
> the current one (only look at portfiles that are tagged by the trusted
> users/committers), or have mild assurance of "OK" (works on the build farm),
> or anything that someone in the community says is OK, or anything that
> anyone has submitted.

I really like this vision. And I also agree with Rainer's take that MacPorts
has very few contributers right now, earlier today / yesterday. Given
the size of the project, the number of ports, and the count of
"nomaintainer" ports as well.

We should strive for being able to take advantage of various
levels of contributions. Be it just voting, tagging, of classical
bug-filing, patch-submitting or core development. It's much
work of course, but once the project makes it clear that such
are the goals, somebody might step forward and help or even
drive such an effort.

Generally, it can only help to send a clear message on the various channels,
that we really welcome contributions. Wiki and guide could be a
bit more clear on this _without_ compromising any quality standard.
I fear that some parts of these are able to discourage newcomers.


-- 
Florian Ebeling
Twitter: febeling
florian.ebeling at gmail.com