mscgen maintenance, was Re: commit request for 24326

[Titus von Boxberg]

Am 29.04.2010 um 09:26 schrieb Ryan Schmidt:
> Sorry about the delay. I added the port.
Thanks!

>> I would also volunteer for maintenance of this port and mscgen,
>> the latter apparently has been abandoned by landonf.
> 
> While true that Landon hasn't been committing many changes to MacPorts lately, note that he is one of the founders of MacPorts, so we should give him the benefit of the doubt.
> 
> Why do you believe mscgen has been abandoned? It's at version 0.17 which its homepage says is the latest, and there are no open tickets filed against it. Is it not working for you? If so, please discuss it here or file a bug report.
The bump to 0.17 (from 0.13: 27/10/2008 according to mscgen's changelog)
was initiated by me, and the maintainer timed out:
See ticket 23962

Being new to macports, wanting to know what to do about the time(out) (and because my first patch
was committed/accepted extremely quickly in about a day),
I then randomly picked about eight trac tickets which landonf is/was assigned to
and - to my memory - nearly all of them were resolved/fixed in a way similar to the mscgen one.
Thus, I concluded that landonf does not actively maintain this and maybe other port(s).

Just for curiosity: Does trac provide a statistics page where you can get these and similar numbers?

Being new I'm not the right one to discuss landon's merits or current activities.
I can also go the normal trac way and send in patches for mscgen when I note that a new version is out.

>> (Don't really know yet if being a maintainer is possible without commit rights.)
> Yes, it is; in fact all port maintainers start out without commit rights. As explained on the page about getting commit access, you need to first be involved with the project and preferably maintain several ports before you can be considered for commit access.
> 
> http://guide.macports.org/chunked/project.membership.html
OK, thanks for the hint!

Regards
Titus