On Fri, 21 Jan 2022 at 18:29:27 +0100, Marc Espie wrote: > In my opinion, our main issue is the lack of new blood. > > We have chronically fewer people who can give okays than ports waiting. > > One big "meta" stuff that needs doing is pointing out (especially from > new guys) what can be improved in the documentation of the porting process... > sometimes pointing people in the right direction. > > Informal poll: what thing weirded you guys out the first time you touched > OpenBSD ports coming from other platforms. > > What kind of gotcha can we get rid of, so that "new ports" will tend to > be squeaky clean, infrastructure-wise, and ready for import. > > Maybe we'd need an FAQ from people coming from elsewhere explaining the > main differences to (say) deb, rpm, freebsd ?...
Using CVS and dealing with tarballs is probably pretty ancient-feeling for many outsiders. I don't know that more documentation is really the problem. I personally tend to ignore most ports@ emails that aren't diffs I can easily view in my e-mail client because it's a hassle to save the attachment, tar -t it to see what its directory structure is, untar it in the proper place, try to build it, then provide feedback by copying parts of the Makefile to an e-mail or doing some other work to produce a diff. Maybe we can do something radical like enable GitHub pull requests to let people submit changes against the ports repo on GitHub, do review and feedback on those on GitHub, and once it's been approved by a developer, that developer can do the final legwork of committing it to CVS and closing the pull request (since we can't commit directly to the Git repo). I believe that the GitHub repo can be configured to also email ports@openbsd.org on any submissions/comments there, so the mailing list would still be in the loop on everything for anyone that doesn't want to use GitHub.
