Important: MacPorts PortMgr Changes

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Sep 30, 2008, at 9:18 AM, James Berry wrote:

> We have asked Jordan Hubbard, the father of MacPorts, to join us on  
> the Elder Council, and he has given his tentative acceptance.

First, let me thank James, Markus and Juan for having both the insight  
and the courage to recognize their own life-induced limitations and  
put the project ahead of any personal attachments they may feel.  That  
is a less common virtue than one might think, so I raise my hat to  
them for taking this step and for the degree of thought and care they  
so clearly put into this message!

Second, I do fervently hope that their "call for volunteers" is not  
met with the sound of crickets chirping because this project really  
does need leadership to get to the next phase of its development -  
milestones like binary packages [available from macports.org], regular  
builds and associated regression testing, and further improvements to  
some of the more advanced technologies (at least by comparison to the  
make-based ports collections we're all familiar with) which underlie  
MacPorts.

There is still a lot of untapped potential in the current design, and  
the next generation of leadership for MacPorts will have a lot to do  
with how much energy and focus is applied to these sorts of  
challenges, so if you're one of the regular faces we see around here  
(or even someone who's not so regular, but would like to be and  
sincerely feels they have the time and energy required), please, step  
up!

Finally, I'd like to correct one small misperception, as flattering as  
it is, which is that I'm the "Father" of MacPorts.  Landon Fuller  
really deserves that distinction, if any single individual does, and I  
think it's more accurate to refer to me as the "Godfather" of MacPorts  
since I got the project initially created and funded, and you can see  
my fingerprints here and there in the design (usually as a result of  
cornering Landon in his office and waving my arms until he gave in on  
some point), but Landon is the guy who put all the pieces together and  
actually coded version 1.0.  From that point forward, we also owe a  
debt of gratitude to a number of non-Apple people (and they know who  
they are) for taking things much, much further and making sure that  
the baby we left on the community's doorstep did not subsequently die  
from exposure and neglect  [OK, that's a HORRIBLE analogy, but I'm  
known for those, so I'll just leave it at that].  Thank you portmgr,  
and thank you macports volunteers!

We at Apple will, in turn, continue to contribute where we can by  
keeping the infrastructure up and running, but it's really up to the  
community (that's you) at this point, so I really hope people will  
step into these rather large shoes and make the most of the  
opportunity to further organize and promote the wealth of open source  
offerings for Mac OS X!

- Jordan