I think the best reply to the original email (Simeó) is:
How can I help?
I have always liked the 3 layers of FreBSD with kernel, userland and
ports. Complicating this would not be good.
(I am long time FreeBSD user that decided to learn the process of
porting software this year. Submitted my first in March which is in the
tree (thank you decke), my second in April still waiting for final
review and my third in july which was removed by upstream before review.
I saw the backlog and had similar thoughts as Simeó.)
Greetings
/Roger
Den 2026-10-19 kl. 22:34, skrev Marek Zarychta:
On 19.10.2026 at 22:07, Daniel Engberg wrote:
On 2026-10-19 21:56, Bernhard Froehlich wrote:
---- Am Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:58:12 +0200 *[email protected]
schrieb * ----
A month ago, I decided to upload a new port after years of not
doing so. It’s been open for 30 days and absolutely nothing has
happened. That’s not really the problem, though—the port isn’t
anything special. Just a small Perl wrapper for some mojo stuff.
The problem is that when I look at Bugzilla, there are 590 ports
waiting to be committed
<https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=Open&limit=0&list_id=996712&order=changeddate%20DESC%2Cpriority%2Cbug_severity&product=Ports%20%26%20Packages&query_format=advanced>,
some of which are 10 years old! It’s all very concerning—it
doesn’t bode well for FreeBSD.
Best regards, the last one to turn off the lights
Simeó Reig
Thanks a lot for your motivating words of wisdom!
Anyway your statistics are wrong. That 590 tickets in bugzilla
are not 590 ports to be committed but 590 bugs which are
assigned and Open. Completely useless number. Overall we
currently close around 350 Ports PRs per week but we have a
backlog of around 2950 PRs.
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/page.cgi?id=dashboard.html
Feel free to help or at least stop wasting time with useless stats.
I understand the frustration, unfortunately there are
administrative/management issues regarding the ports tree affecting
multiple areas including productivity and engagement which in turn
also affects our ability to process PRs. On top of that most of us
are volunteers with limited time, hardware etc.
Best regards,
Daniel
With LLVM and the abundance of freely available software, the Ports
Tree can grow rapidly. However, this raises questions about how we
balance software availability with long-term maintainability.
One issue worth reconsidering is the two-week maintainer timeout. For
simple updates and minor fixes, the two-week timeout could be
shortened, while more substantial changes would still receive adequate
review.
We should also consider whether every piece of software needs to be
included in the official tree. Some ports serve only a narrow audience
or duplicate existing functionality, yet still require resources to
build and maintain. Evaluating the broader usefulness of new ports
could help keep the collection manageable and sustainable. I maintain
a few ports locally, but I doubt they would be useful to a
sufficiently broad audience to justify their inclusion in the official
tree, especially given the resources required to build and maintain them.
The goal should not be to discourage contributions, but to ensure that
the growth of the Ports Tree brings lasting value to the FreeBSD
community.
Cheers
--
Marek Zarychta
