I suggest to add a section to "3.2.2. Maintainer responsibilities" (https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/ports-contributing.html) Current maintainer responsibilities don't cover the situation when something is broken in the port. This situation is just leaft out. IMO, maintainer should at least try to solve the problem if he can, not just passively wait for others to submit patches. For example, imagine that somebody reports a problem. This user can't himself resolve it and creates a bug report. Following the current rules, the maintainer would just wait for patches from this user or somebody else. This would likely result in inaction through mutual wait and unmet/mismatched expectations. The "Maintainer responsibilities" section should ask maintainers to be a bit more proactive, and to at least make an attempt to fix reported problems within the extent of their abilities and resources. Suggested addition: ---BEGIN--- 4. Fix known problems, keep ports in a working order Please attempt to resolve known problems in the ports that your maintain. When others report a problem or you yourself find a problem in the port, please make a reasonable effort to fix the problem and submit your changes that would resolve the issue. ---END--- Current paragraphs 4,5,6,7 can be bumped by 1.
How is this substantively different from what's there ("Ensure your ports continue to build correctly" and "Investigate bug reports and PRs related to your port")? The danger with specifically enumerating things is that somebody is going to claim that anything not there is somebody else's problem. I'm also not wild about making it sound like not knowing how to fix a problem is grounds for losing maintainership. How would we have any idea whether or not a maintainer attempted to resolve a problem in a PR?
Closing this out. I'd prefer that we err on the side of trusting our maintainers to DTRT.