Tickets affecting multiple ports and committers & "annoying" commits

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 20 December 2016 at 07:38, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> On Dec 11, 2016, at 12:13 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>> After some cool features have been enabled on Trac, in particular the
>> "See:" and "Closes:" syntax that automatically adds a comment, I
>> wonder what to do with tickets that affect many ports and maintainers.
>
> I would prefer to avoid such tickets as much as possible.
>
>> Examples include tickets like "replace no_x11 with x11", "switch to
>> perl5.26", ...
>>    https://trac.macports.org/ticket/39383
>> etc.
>
> I agree those are the types of tickets where it is necessary to list many ports.
>
>> If we subscribe 100 maintainers with 100 ports, each maintainer will
>> receive an email every time any port gets fixed.
>
> We should not make / allow each maintainer to fix their own port for this issue. There should be a single pull request that makes the correct fix for all ports. Maintainers can be given an amount of time to voice objections to the change. After objections have been dealt with and the time expires, the pull request can be merged as one commit which will generate just one notification.

Sure. I would agree with this in principle. But resolving some tickets
makes for a non-trivial amount of time. Revbumping all dependencies
without testing anything is one thing, testing things is something
completely different.

A ticket like this one:
    https://trac.macports.org/ticket/47197
actually requires testing and closer inspection of the Portfiles.
(Btw: quite some of your ports wait there as well.)

One usually ends up opening the file and realizing that:
- tabs are still being used all over the place
- md5 is used instead of newer checksums
- port is completely outdated
- website has moved, livecheck no longer works
- some components are installed to wrong places or the port no longer
conforms to some recently introduced practices
etc.

And with over 200 ports this sums up.

(I remember how much time it took me to make the transition of
wxWidgets. And even though the tickets requesting changes or at least
a review were open "forever", I sadly managed to get some maintainer
super dissatisfied.)

Updating a pull request still sends an email on each change to almost
everyone with commit rights. Unless someone is willing to work on this
until all the > 200 ports are done at once within a relatively short
time period, there is a high chance that ports will start diverging,
so it doesn't make sense to wait forever.

Mojca