Changing port maintainership rules

[Jeremy Lavergne]

> actually I think most if not all MacPorts committer are smart and cautious enough to not break other people's ports, i.e. I for example would never touch autoconf or anything related without deep understanding of what I'm doing.

I'll take issue with this assumption as I've broken plenty of other ports (owned or not) by only checking that they compile. Having fully functional binaries is another story. More necessary skills include knowing how to fix code and how to implement changes in any build system, not to mention getting that all to play correctly within MacPorts' guidelines.

>  When I'm unsure if a specific patch is good or bad for a specific port then I of course ask the maintainer or other people, either on the list, on IRC or elsewhere, if and how to continue.

Waiting for a never-coming (or simply later than desired) response may result in hasty actions when there's no known authority to answer your questions about a specific port. You'd then have to go upstream, and even then the developers may be swamped or not care about your OS X woes.

I think what you're after is what we have already: publish a ticket for any changes you'd like made and have it assigned to the maintainer. They should respond regardless of their intentions for not patching or upgrading. If they ignore it then it's fair game (we really should have a script that computes a list of the ignored and/or abandoned ports for the MacPorts managers).

Communication is the real issue here.

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