Hi Roger,
I consider your question as serious interest so let me answer it in a serious way. You already know that we are quite understaffed as in "we're dealing with a portstree that has 35k ports and are getting flooded with new ports, updates, security issues besides the never ending improvements in the open source world". So the reality is that you are free to choose to help wherever you feel comfortable. Just to give you an idea of what I mean: Check the list of ports that are unmaintained and vulnerable: https://portstatus.bsdproject.de/maintainer/ports%40FreeBSD.org?f=updates&sort=cvss&dir=desc Try to update the ones that are simple and leaf ports (not used by any others) submit patches for them and if you feel especially interested in them adopt them as a maintainer. Then continue with just unmaintained and outdated ones: https://portstatus.bsdproject.de/maintainer/ports%40FreeBSD.org?f=updates Or let's have a look a licensing. That's manual work but not hard one and we will need it to make progress with SBOMs: https://portslicense.freebsd.org/maintainers/[email protected] And then I'm pretty sure we all want to have a better "pkg audit" so let's populate CPE data to the ports. It's about as hard as checking licenses but there are about 1-2k ports to check manually: https://github.com/decke/chkcpe You like to port new stuff that we don't have in the portstree yet? https://wiki.freebsd.org/WantedPorts If you are here somewhere I'm pretty sure you got your commit bit already and found more dirty spots in the portstree yourself that keep you busy for years. Feel free to also join us on ports related IRC channels to see how we fight the dragon or just to get your questions answered. https://wiki.freebsd.org/IRC/Channels -- Bernhard Froehlich https://www.bluelife.at/ From: Roger Olofsson <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2026 11:53:16 +0200 Subject: Re: There are 593 ports pending to be commited, disaster 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 mailto:[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 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
