macports rot

[Jonathan Stickel]

I would like to express some concerns about trends I've noticed in the 
Macports community. I've been a Macports user and contributor for many 
years. I understand the imperfect nature of open-source projects run by 
volunteers. Interest and contributions, both by developers and periphery 
contributors, waxes and wanes. It seems to me that Macports is waning. 
With the move to github, developer and port-maintainer attention to 
tickets on trac really dropped off. This was partially made up for by 
increased attention and fast turnaround with pull requests. Recently, 
even pull requests are languishing. Reasonable fixes are ignored, or, if 
problems with the contributions are identified by developers and 
maintainers, the problems are pointed out with no effort to provide 
constructive input.

I try to help where and when I can. When something is not working for 
me, I try my best to find a fix and contribute a pull request. I also 
respond in a reasonable time to tickets and PRs for ports for which I am 
maintainer. I think this is quite reasonable and the best I can do 
considering my paying job. I know that I do not have enough time to act 
as a developer, and so I am not asking for that.

So where is Macports headed? I think the core architecture and systems 
of Macports are well built. It just needs a little more attention. How 
can we achieve that? Has Homewbrew simply siphoned off too much user and 
developer base? I don't know.

Regards,
Jonathan