On Fri, Jul 09, 2010 at 10:51:01PM +0200, Dominic Fandrey wrote: > > Ok - but how do we define "experienced"? Someone who has submitted 100 > > PORTVERSION++ PRs? I'm not convinced we have enough contributors who are > > experienced enough to be given commit rights, but not contributing > > enough to be offered full access. > > Well, I don't see a mass recruiting plan in action and the typical > response time for a ports PR has dropped from a couple of hours to > something around a month following a singular event everyone > here probably already knows about. > > Though there are a lot of committers, there aren't many active > committers. The need seems obvious to me and I figured it would > be obvious to create some middle ground where the demands from > both sides are less.
Indeed, part of the problem is burn-out. We recruit committers, and then their activity tapers off (I'm guilty of this myself). Part of this, I believe, is down to the effort involved in maintaining a useful (up-to-date) testing environment -- hence my advocacy of a centralised tinderbox resource. The machines I used to use are out-of-date and probably inadequate now. I don't disagree in principle with the idea of having a middle ground, just not sure (how) it would work in practice. > > Cases where other ports need touching (e.g., library bumps), or an > > update depends on another port/PR elsewhere could prove to be > > problematic. > > Those are the kind of maintainers that have the commit bit anyway. > People who do the major stuff like Xorg, KDE, gnome, autobreak ... > I think those are also the people who carry the main burden of > Maintainer PRs. They really shouldn't have to, they've got more > than enough work. > > >>> One thing that is sorely missed -- by me, at least -- is the ports > >>> tinderbox mini-cluster we had previously (graciously provided by simon > >>> and erwin). The major bottleneck in the review/commit process is the > >>> testing part (again, I speak for myself). A set of tinderbox machines > >>> representing the tier-1 architectures, to which we could grant > >>> contributors access, would reduce the burden on committers (if a > >>> patch/PR arrives with an accompanying log file). > >> > >> What needs to be done? (I.e. money, work hours) > > > > Machine(s), rack-space, someone to maintain said machines to a decent > > standard. Possibly money could solve these issues. :-) > > > > I'm not sure how many non-committers were aware of / given access to tb3 > > and tb4 when they were around, but if tinderbox were used as a matter of > > course, it would, I believe go some way to speeding things up. > > > > So if I set up a private tinderbox and provide amd64 and i386 > 6-/7-/8-stable logs with every PR I submit it would hasten the > processing of my PRs? > > If that is so, I'll get me a small quad-core with ~16GB RAM > and a huge hard disk just for this purpose (my largest hard disk > is the one in my notebook, not sufficient for all the distfiles > and packages). Sure, I would be more likely to look at / commit your patches in a timely fashion if you've done part of the work for me. I'm pretty sure it helped back when I was submitting lots of ports PRs. -- Shaun Amott // PGP: 0x6B387A9A "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - Ralph Waldo Emerson _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
