Feature request: "subscribing" to tickets of specific ports

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 20, 2013, at 08:03, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> I am interested in a specific subset of ports, some of which have no
> maintainer or still have a maintainer but in reality a "port
> abandoned" ticket would be in place. I don't want to be a maintainer
> for those, but:
> - I'm willing to look into bug reports for some ports without maintainer
> - I'm willing to test and commit changes to ports with a maintainer
> without commit rights
> - and I'm interested in simply following development of other ports
> (like wxWidgets where changes highly influence one of my own ports).
> 
> However, I'm not interested in following *all* the commits and *all*
> the tickets for MacPorts - that would simply take way too much time. I
> sometimes CC myself on some tickets, but only if I happen to see the
> ticket. Most of them go unnoticed.
> 
> When someone submits a ticket, the maintainer gets CC-ed (if not by
> submitter, by the first one who sees that ticket). That is fine, but
> that excludes anyone else who might be interested in following
> maintenance of that port.
> 
> Ideally I would like to subscribe to email sent to, say,
> wxWidgets at port.macports.org or
> someportwithoutmaintainer at port.macports.org and if:
> - one would have to CC wxWidgets at port.macports.org instead of its maintainer
> - cron job of after-commit hook would send emails to that email
> address for any changes to that port in SVN
> then it would be a lot easier for some of us (without the resources to
> follow the whole macports repository) to help with patches, ideas, ...
> for exactly those ports that are of interest to us.
> 
> One could have other pseudo-port addresses like port.new@ (for
> everyone interested in hearing about submissions for new ports),
> port.nomaintainer@ (for anyone interested in seeing tickets for
> unmaintained ports where the chance of nobody looking into report is
> higer), group.science@ (for all ports in a specific group),
> ticket.wontfix@ (for feedback of all tickets that won't get fixed for
> some reason), ... (those were just a few different ideas)
> 
> Ideally I would like to have a page somewhere on trac.macports.org
> where I would click the list of ports (or groups/pseudoports) that I'm
> interested in following. The maintainer would of course have to be
> subscribed, but everyone else with interest could join.
> 
> What do you think of this idea?

It sounds very interesting, but none of that infrastructure exists today so it would all have to be created. 

Some other sites (e.g. github) and package systems (e.g. npm) have the concept of "starring" projects you're interested in. I could see MacPorts being enhanced with that capability. Then additional features could be added along the lines you suggest, where you could be emailed when things happen with the ports you've starred. Or there could be a web page or rss news feed for ports you've starred. This relies on MacPorts knowing who you are, which is also not present yet. (Trac knows who you are; MacPorts could be enhanced to use your Trac login.)