Taking over maintainership of ports that are unmaintained is a great way to get involved. Unmaintained ports are only updated and fixed when somebody volunteers to work on them. There are a large number of unmaintained ports. It is a good idea to start with adopting a port that you use regularly.
Unmaintained ports have their
MAINTAINER
set to
ports@FreeBSD.org
. A list of unmaintained
ports and their current errors and problem reports can be seen
at the FreeBSD
Ports Monitoring System.
Some ports affect a large number of others due to dependencies and slave port relationships. Generally, we want people to have some experience before they maintain such ports.
You can find out whether or not a port has dependencies
or slave ports by looking at a master index of ports called
INDEX
. (The name of the file varies
by release of FreeBSD; for instance,
INDEX-8
.) Some ports have conditional
dependencies that are not included in a default
INDEX
build. We expect you to be able to
recognize such ports by looking through other ports'
Makefile
s.
First make sure you understand your responsibilities as a maintainer. Also read the Porter's Handbook. Please do not commit yourself to more than you feel you can comfortably handle.
You may request maintainership of any unmaintained port
as soon as you wish. Simply set MAINTAINER
to your own email address and send a PR (Problem Report) with
the change. If the port has build errors or needs updating,
you may wish to include any other changes in the same PR.
This will help because many committers are less willing to
assign maintainership to someone who does not have a known
track record with FreeBSD. Submitting PRs that fix build errors
or update ports are the best ways to establish one.
File your PR with category ports
and
class change-request
. A committer will
examine your PR, commit the changes, and finally close the
PR. Sometimes this process can take a little while
(committers are volunteers, too :).
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.