What Brett has mentioned is a common theme. Many people get maintenance burn out, the same thing happened to me trying to maintain a multilib version. The one problem that has always persisted in the CRUX community is the lack of man power to maintain ports. I think making it easier for the community as a whole to maintain ports would be of great benefit. Has there been any consideration to moving the git repos to a more social platform such as github, or a self-hosted solution such as gitlab? This would make it easier for the community to push change requests to the official repositories.

On 8 April 2012 09:08, Brett Goulder <predatorfreak@dcaf-security.org> wrote:
On 04/03/2012 11:53 AM, Emmanuel Benisty wrote:
Hi Danny and list,

On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Danny Rawlins<monster.romster@gmail.com>  wrote:
On 01/04/12 21:07, Emmanuel Benisty wrote:
[---snip---]
If some ports are behind the latest versions, I would imagine that's
because CRUX is lacking manpower. On the other hand, I understand that
CRUX can't accept any random user as a developer. Most of the time,
I've been updating ports by myself, on my machines, but I think it's
rather sad that 1. it can't benefit the whole community 2. it's a
duplicate effort as sooner or later, the official maintainer will
update those ports. I've been posting few patches on IRC or sometimes
sent them to maintainers by email but that is not always efficient
because if you're too busy to update your ports, you're most likely
too busy to review others' patches too. So I've been thinking about
the following:

What would you think about the creation of a community-patches-queue
git repo accessible by, well, CRUX community. This is how it could
work:

1. User U has updated port P on his machine, he would then commit a
diff patch to community-patches-queue (we could also make a ports repo
out of it and encourage people to use and test those ports but that's
another story)
2. One (or more?) CRUX developer, available at that time, would
volunteer to review and sign-off the patch.
3. Signed-off patches are sent to the official maintainer (or
committed to community-patches-acked) so he could review and apply
them or just apply them with peace of mind if he's too busy to review
them fully (or even let other devs apply them?)

I have done something smiler recently I forked the xorg repository and
updated nearly everything except a couple of ports that would break
things, if I post the site here it'll get this email spam filtered, it's
been on jaegers irc log a few times. I've thought of doing the same for
opt and perhaps contrib, but I would only be bumping stuff that I would
be confident to do so.

I am in opt so I guess I am a dev now, I would welcome some system
system for more community involvement.
Thanks for your informative reply. The main difference is this would
be open to random users (i.e. trust level of zero) - as opposed to you
being a CRUX developer - hence the sign-off process proposal.

I've created a repo and slowly started to add some patches. Anyone
willing to join, please let me know your github username or repo to
pull from.

https://github.com/horrorStruck/community-patches-queue
or
git clone git://github.com/horrorStruck/community-patches-queue.git

what's in there so far (not much):
 opt/alsa-lib-1.0.24.1-1.0.25.patch   |   59 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 opt/alsa-oss-1.0.17-1.0.25.patch     |   26 ++++++++++++
 opt/alsa-utils-1.0.24.1-1.0.25.patch |   27 ++++++++++++
 opt/gtk-2.24.8-2.24.10.patch         |   54 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
 opt/pango-1.26.2-1.28.4.patch        |   76 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 opt/syslinux-4.04-4.05.patch         |   62 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 opt/wireshark-1.6.4-1.6.6.patch      |   50 ++++++++++++++++++++++

Lastly, if you think this is just wasting bandwidth and spamming your
inbox, don't hesitate to let me know.

Cheers,
-- Emmanuel
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Hello Folks,

It's been a long long time since I've posted here, but I figured I'd chime in here. I've basically had to give up using CRUX because it became too much work on my own part to maintain my CRUX systems, and I often don't have the time do that between work, school and real life stuff. Part of the issue that forced me to give it up was exactly the issue under discussion: duplication of work due to out of date ports.

A lot of the CRUX developers/maintainers are overloaded, making it hard to track every piece of software they are in charge of. The general solution Emmanuel proposed is definitely a step in the right direction, but it would be far better to leave this as a normal git repository. It's pretty easy to do merges with git, and that would allow it to mostly be a "review differences, merge into main repository" work flow. Obviously, this is all outside observation and I'm pretty far removed from the hands on day-to-day activity of CRUX, but a lot of these problems aren't new (heck, this issue was present when I began using CRUX).

Best Regards,
Brett Goulder

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