Editing maintained ports

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 12:14 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
> Existing source files, including Portfiles, containing tabs should have them converted to spaces, and have the modeline added declaring that.
>
> You can do this to ports you maintain, or ports which are unmaintained. For maintained ports, whether openmaintainer or not, you should get consent from the maintainer first.
>
> Maintainers should proactively make this change in all their ports without needing to be asked.

OK, sure, but what if maintainers don't do the change?

We now have roughly 100 perl modules left (missing 5.20, most of them
need an upgrade as well, and most of them use a weird mixture of tabs
and spaces).

Apart from around 6 on my shortlisted todo (or if someone comes to
them sooner) and a bunch of those where I don't know yet how to deal
with problems, all the remaining ports are either openmaintainer or
maintained.

I opened
    http://trac.macports.org/ticket/46005
with basically zero response from maintainers (apart from the very few
proactive users like David or Lawrence who started working on
non-maintained ports).

For those remaining hundred ports it would be nice to:
a) clean up the whitespace
b) upgrade the version
c) add 5.18 5.20 to supported versions
d) do any other clean-up, changes or testing that might be needed

What's the proper way to get this done without violating the rules? In
particular: should one open one hundred tickets asking for permission
to change whitespace for every single port? This is painful mostly
because there usually need to be done multiple changes simultaneously
(whitespace + upgrade + support for 5.18/5.20; so probably three
patches with a request: change whitespace, upgrade on original port,
upgrade on the port with whitespace adjustments) and opening one
hundred tickets just multiplies the work. Let alone the fact that
probably 90% of those requests wouldn't even be answered.

Mojca