Issues with oudated ports / GitHub

[Rainer Müller]

On 2016-10-07 18:25, Ken Cunningham wrote:
> The current "port update" ticket queue I find to be a rather
> unpredictable mixture of requests of port updates, requests for new
> ports, announcements that somebody has noticed a version update has
> come available, and finished port updates awaiting approval by
> committers. I don’t mind picking off a few of these and updating
> them, or building some new ones, but it’s a bit of a tangle
> sometimes.
> 
> Like this ticket: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/52538
> 
> I think this ticket represents someone noticing there’s a new version
> available, and requesting the existing port be updated. But that
> should be in a different lineup, IMHO.

We are currently using the type field with "defect", "enhancement",
"update", "submission", "request". A ticket should be filed with the
appropriate type.

To indicate a patch is attached to the ticket, we add the "haspatch"
keyword. Additionally the "maintainer" keyword can be added to express
the update needs no thorough review as it comes directly from the
maintainer.

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Tickets#Keywords

I am not sure how we could change these to make triaging trickets easier.

> And there are "requests for ports" ( I think this means new requests
> for ports that don’t presently exist, mostly) that go back 11 years.
> Port submissions that go back the same length of time. Possibly some
> kind of massive clean-out of the old, dead, never-will-be-touched
> stuff might need to happen.

Requests for new ports could still be valid after years. This list could
be helpful for newcomers that want to create new ports. The number of
people in CC in such a ticket could also be an indicator of its importance.

A few years back, I began adding a keyword "lack-of-interest" to tickets
that where open for a long time without response on questions. When the
reporter does no longer seem to want it or there is nobody else who
steps up to do it, just closed these tickets.

Maybe there would be a better approach that can become a real policy to
avoid so much old cruft in the tickets.

Rainer