Requesting Commit Rights

Once you have a track record as a maintainer (achieved by all-around good works such as submitting new ports with yourself as a maintainer, submitting bug fixes for existing ports, etc), we encourage you to apply for commit status so that you can easilly keep your ports up to date and participate in keeping MacPorts such a strong community. If you feel you are ready for commit rights, please send an email to mailto:macports-mgr@…, with the title "Request for Commit Rights" and a short explanation for why think you deserve commit rights.

Port Committer Responsibilities

1. PortIndex is now updated automatically (every 12 hours) so it must not be touched
2. A commit affects one port (including however many files are required for that one port)
3. The exception to the one port/one commit rule is where several Portfiles make use of some feature which is in need of updating
   1. Due to a new feature which has been added to the current release to fix hacks used by various Portfiles
   2. A command is found to be broken
   3. You need to change your email address for your ports
   4. Other, similar reasons
4. All committers must subscribe to the ​macports-changes list under their MacPorts credentials to keep track of current changes and because the list is subscriber-post-only, so commit messages will otherwise be rejected
5. New top-level categories (those which are represented by directories in the MacPorts tree) need to be approved prior to adding; secondary categories (the second and later ones listed on the categories Portfile key) can be added when it makes sense (since these really only show under the web interface, and have no filesystem representation)
6. Make sure the port name matches between the MacPorts svn directory name and the name Portfile key (while the system works fine when they don't, keeping them synchronized avoids confusing situations)
7. Should commit logs be finally standardized? Some places have the CVS/Template which contains a few common headers (Bug:, Submitted By:, etc), but these are not always present or used for that matter
8. Under most circumstances, do not modify a port belonging to another maintainer; this is to be done either via a Trac ticket or by direct communication with the maintainer. Exceptions are:
   1. When a port is broken (and the update should be just to fix the port, no other updates "while you're there")
   2. When nomaintainer@… is the maintainer; this really means the port is unowned (feel free to take it over)
   3. When openmaintainer@… is co-maintainer; this signifies that the primary maintainer has no prior objections to others changing it
   4. When the maintainer says the update is okay and asks you to commit your update; in this case, be sure to note in the commit message that it was Approved by: the maintainer (see the bit about commit log entries above)
9. In the configuration for your Subversion client, enable automatic property setting and, for all files named Portfile, setting "svn:eol-style" to "native" and "svn:keywords" to "Id". If you are not using Subversion's own svn command-line client, see its documentation. For svn, you can make the appropriate changes by editing ~/.subversion/config as follows:

   ...
   
   [miscellany]
   enable-auto-props
   
   ...
   
   [auto-props]
   Portfile = svn:eol-style=native;svn:keywords=Id
   

Mailing Lists and Change Logs

Notification of change logging is either via the ​macports-changes list or by subscribing to the RSS feeds provided by trac (see the RSS feeds of the Timeline view and the Source Repository). Note that you may customize the Timeline prior to subscribing to it, in order to control which types of information you are fed. In addition to getting an RSS feed of general project events, you may also subscribe to changes to some portion of the source tree or to bug reports/tickets.

If you use a newsreader such as ​NetNewsWire, and if you subscribe to the https version of the feed, you must ensure that you trust the certificate svn.macosforge.org from the certificate authority opensource.apple.com. You can tell Safari to "trust" this certificate when it sees it; you may need to set the trust settings for the certificate and/or authority from within Keychain access. Without these trust settings, NetNewsWire will not receive the feed. A better solution is to make sure that you subscribe to the http version of the feed (change the scheme on the URL to http from https).

Committer Addresses

We prefer that those with commit rights use their @macports.org address when listing themselves as a committer. This helps other committers to distinguish maintainers who are committers from those who are not.

Several special maintainer addresses are used to distinguish additional meta-information about ports. Please see SpecialMaintainerAddresses.

Who are you?

Add yourself to our list of contributors at MacPortsDevelopers.