[kde-freebsd] KDE ports on FreeBSD: how do you handle them?

[Romain Tartière]

Dear KDE maintainer,

Taking part of other efforts of « maintaining sets of related ports » (I
will detail this bellow), I am interested in knowing how you handle the
KDE ports in order to have a good overview of how such projects are
managed and provide advices for people who are new in this area.

Let's detail the background:
  - I have been tracking the GNOME desktop evolution through the
    MarcusCom repository [1] for a few years.  Ports are managed in a
    CVS repository and a shell script called ``marcusmerge'' is used to
    merge this repository ports into the FreeBSD ports tree on the
    user's computer.
    This repository contains about 70 ports.
  - About one year ago, I joined the BSD# Project [2] which aims to port
    the Free/Libre .Net framework to FreeBSD.  At first, BSD# used
    ``mono-merge'' which was a fork of ``marcusmerge'' for merging the
    ports in the subversion repository, but because it was not possible
    to use both scripts at the same time (main reason), a more generic
    tool has been developed to « Maintain a set of ports trees » and
    called portshaker [3]. At the time of writing, their are about 60
    ports in the BSD# repository.
  - More recently, I needed a recent TeX setup on FreeBSD and wanted to
    use TeXLive for which no ports were available.  I quickly hacked
    something that fits my needs and use portshaker to handle the 1500
    ports that composed the repository [4].

To sum up:
  - I follow 3 projects that maintain « groups of ports », taking part
    in two of them.
  - I see many other projects that are or may be handled in a similar
    way, for example e17 (~30 ports), GUPnP (~15 ports, not yet ported
    to FreeBSD)... and x11!


Basically, the idea is that there are people maintaining sets of related
ports, but no « study » of how they do it, what advantages and problems
do they encounter with their method, etc.

I empirically learned a lot (and am still learning) and I think that «
Managing (large?) collection of ports » is a topic that deserves to be
detailed.

Since I can't find resources regarding this, I take it! Thus,  I would
like to gather information on « How do you manage all KDE ports ? »

I know this is a vast question, but I think you can really help me if I
understand how you work on all the KDE ports. So, if you have a little
time to contribute and answer the following questions, I would be very
happy :-) (I don't use KDE myself, and a quick search did not provide
answer to my questions).


Where does the development and tests of new ports takes place (locally
on you computer vs. on some place on the internet)?

Do you use any version control system?

Are the ports under development publicly available?

Do you work on a complete copy of the FreeBSD ports tree you sync from
time to time or just a « partial » ports tree that only contains ports
that have been changed?

How do you perform your tests?

As far as I can see, you trend to commit « big » changes to the FreeBSD
ports tree, i.e. you update all ports to the latest version, test, and
once it is Okay, commit it to the FreeBSD ports tree, right?

How do you work with contributors (patches, etc.)?

What are the main problems you encounter

Do you have a set of scripts / tools to ease development and make
annoying tasks more fun?

Do you have any additional details you would like to add?


If you prefer not directly answering to these questions but rather
describe how you work in a few paragraphs, feel free to do so: these
questions are only starters!
If you have no time to write all you want to say but still want to help
me collect information on how you work, maybe we can do this over the
phone (I have an awful English accent and a buggy SIP phone but we can
still try something).


Thanks in advance!
Romain


References:
  1. http://www.marcuscom.com:8080/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/
  2. http://code.google.com/p/bsd-sharp
  3. http://code.google.com/p/bsd-sharp/source/browse/branches/portshaker/
  4. http://code.google.com/p/freebsd-texlive/

-- 
Romain Tartière <romain at blogreen.org>        http://romain.blogreen.org/
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