Issues with oudated ports / GitHub

[Rainer Müller]

On 2016-10-07 19:07, Marcel Bischoff wrote:
> On 16/10/07, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> 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.

Anybody can get listed as maintainer, making the promise to do that.
However, when they are not actually keeping it up-to-date, there is
little we can do about it. After following the port abandonment policy,
will will drop the port back to "nomaintainer", leaving you in the same
situation.

> 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.

As soon as I figure out why a port does not build, I might just commit a
fix instead of writing lengthy discussions on that. :-)

> 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?

Yes, definitely. Comments on commits will be discussed here as well as
discussions originally started at tickets that will require more help
from others.

Rainer