Re: Maintainers, porters, and burden of porting

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi Lucas,

Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

> But if porting software to
> KFreeBSD's linuxthreads-based threading library with slightly broken
> semantics becomes my own task, I won't try to solve issues on KFreeBSD
> and instead stop supporting it, because I just don't have the time to do
> that.

That sounds reasonable.  I think a good policy in a case like this is,
"if a co-maintainer interested in this feature (support for platforms
that don't use NPTL) doesn't step up, I am dropping it".  In other
words, the burden for keeping such a feature is even higher than you
said --- what is needed is not a porter but someone interested in and
familiar with both the package and linuxthreads.

The problem with saying "that's the porters' job" is that then nobody
will want to be a porter. :)

Thanks for your hard work!
Jonathan