Adopt an orphaned port project

**lme@** · #1 December 10th, 2012, 17:39

Since the ports tree i now open again, let's start the "Adopt an orphaned port"
project.

=== What is it? ===

According to http://freshports.org/ we currently have 23,940 ports in our tree,
that's really great!
But: There are 4,751 unmaintained ports (approx. 20%), that need _your_ love.

=== What can I do? ===

Adopt one or more ports!

You think it's a lot of work?

That's not necessarily the case, the ports are already there and just need
someone to track the latest upstream versions and someone who keeps the port in
a good shape.

=== How do I know which ports are unmaintained? ===

Thats pretty easy: If you want a list of all unmaintained ports, run

# nawk -F"|" '$6 == "ports@FreeBSD.org" {print $2}' /usr/ports/INDEX-`uname -r | cut -d'.' -f1`

If you want to see which of your installed ports are unmaintained run

a) for pkgng

# pkg query -e "%m == 'ports@FreeBSD.org'" %o

b) for pkg_*

Code:

#!/bin/sh

INDEX="/usr/ports/INDEX-$(uname -r | cut -d'.' -f1)"
MAINTAINER="ports@FreeBSD.org"

grep -h ORIGIN /var/db/pkg/*/+CONTENTS | cut -d: -f2 |
  nawk -v INDEX="$INDEX"  -v MAINTAINER="$MAINTAINER" \
    '{ installed_ports[$0] = 1 }
    END {
    	FS="|"
    	while (getline < INDEX) {
    		if ($6 == MAINTAINER) {
    	   		sub(/\/usr\/ports\//, "", $2)
    			unmaintained_ports[$2] = 1 
    		};
    	}
    		for (port in installed_ports) {
    			if (unmaintained_ports[port]) {
    				print port
    			}
    	}
    }' | sort

=== What can I do then? ===

Pick a port, take a look at the port's Makefile and pkg-descr, see if a new
version is avaiable upstream, check if the WWW line in pkg-descr still points
to a valid site.
Check for broken distfile mirrors, take a look at

http://people.freebsd.org/~ehaupt/di...D.org-bad.html

Find other mirrors, or mirror the distfiles yourself, remove the dead mirrors
from the port's Makefile.

Try to update the port to the new version, add yourself as MAINTAINER in the
Makefile.
If the updated port works, create a patchfile and send a problem
report (PR) with send-pr(1) or via the web interface

http://www.freebsd.org/send-pr.html

All you need then is some patience until some committer grabs the PR and
eventually commits it or ask you to re-work the patch, if there are some issues
left.

h
=== I'd really like to do that, but how do I actually do it? ===

There's very good documentation for porters: The porter's handbook:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/

Don't worry. It's called a book, but it's not a very thick book. Even so it
explains porting very good.
While it's recommended to read the whole book you can also pick the chapters
first that you need to update the port.
If you still have problems or questions then, there are many helpful people at
the ports@FreeBSD.org mailing list.

=== What benefits do I have? ===

Actually there a several benefits:
- You give something back to the community. That's the idea of open source.
- You earn experience with Makefiles, diff(1), patch(1) and other useful tools.
- You and everyone benefits from updated ports
- Your names get added to the list of FreeBSD Contributors
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ors/index.html
- If you create enough PRs and maintain a bunch of ports, it's quite possible that
you get punished with a ports commit bit! \o/

**fonz** · #2 December 10th, 2012, 17:41

Good initiative. I'm certainly going to have a look.

Fonz

gkontos · #3 December 10th, 2012, 19:01

Excellent me too wherever I can help.

vand777 · #4 December 10th, 2012, 19:54

Will have a look as well!

cpu82 · #5 December 10th, 2012, 20:44

lme@

Thanks for your announcement.

Good sticky!

jackp · #6 December 11th, 2012, 14:45

I've had my eye on a couple of neglected ports -- when things at work wind down for the holidays, I'll have a go at updating them.

gnumonk · #7 April 18th, 2013, 14:49

Thanks for sharing this info, I have seen some of them which I used daily using git, but I see those are poiting to old link or dead link. I will probably take those.

But I have a question, since most of the projects were moved to git, how to versioning them, I mean what will be on PORTVERSION?

--
gnumonk

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The Following 16 Users Say Thank You to lme@ For This Useful Post:
bkouhi (February 22nd, 2013), cpu82 (December 10th, 2012), da1 (May 7th, 2013), fonz (December 10th, 2012), gkontos (December 10th, 2012), mrgz (December 12th, 2012), Mur77 (January 25th, 2013), Nukama (April 23rd, 2013), ondra_knezour (December 10th, 2012), segfault (December 10th, 2012), sk8harddiefast (December 11th, 2012), troberts (April 25th, 2013), UNIXgod (December 10th, 2012), vand777 (December 10th, 2012), vertexSymphony (December 13th, 2012), YZMSQ (April 1st, 2013)