Issues with oudated ports / GitHub

[Marcel Bischoff]

On 16/10/07, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> While the latter examples are just minor differences, especially
>> things
>> like ghc, fontforge an pandoc are either completely broken and/or
>> severely outdated. I'm not trying to badmouth anyone or anything, just
>> pointing to the higher (successful) update rate in Homebrew.
>>
>>>> If time and manpower is the problem, wouldn't it be better to move to a
>>>> GitHub-based approach like Homebrew does?
>>>
>>> That doesn't necessarily fix the problem. It's worth noting that there already is a plan to transition to github.
>>
>> Why is that? Also: what do you think the problem actually is and how to
>> rectify it? I'd be very interested to hear that.
>
>The problem is: somebody needs to do the correct work to update each of
>those ports to the latest version. In many cases, tickets are already
>filed, and you can look them up to see what the current status is; if
>you don't find a ticket, please file a new one. In some cases, such as
>boost, pandoc, ghc, there are serious issues preventing the update. If
>Homebrew has solved those problems, great, maybe we can crib from them.

Again, I was under the impression that to be a port maintainer you would
actually need to maintain the port. In this case, checking out what
Homebrew is doing and trying to implement it the MacPort way. As this
does not appear to be the case, I guess when things are broken, they are
just considered being broken.

I don't see any concrete discussion as to why certain ports would not
build, nor any kind of coordination between different port maintainers.
This may very well be my fault due to selective perception on my part.
I'm just a bit confised as to why one project can figure it out while
another lags months or years behind in certain areas.

I'll be sure to devote some time to help solve long-standing issues. The
proper mailing list to discuss those issues is this one I presume?