Links:
About FreeBSD Ports URL:https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
Contributing to Ports URL: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/#ports-contributing
FreeBSD Ports Monitoring URL: http://portsmon.freebsd.org/
Ports Management Team URL: https://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/
Ports Tarball URL: http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/ports/

Contact: René Ladan <portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr@FreeBSD.org>

The Ports Management Team is responsible for overseeing the overall direction of the Ports Tree, building packages, and personnel matters. Below is what happened in the last quarter.

Currently there are just over 30,500 ports in the Ports Tree. There are currently just under 2,800 open ports PRs of which 750 are unassigned. The last quarter saw 9,137 commits by 151 committers on the main branch and 589 commits by 61 committers on the 2022Q3 branch. Compared to two quarters ago, this means a slight increase in the number of ports, but also a slight increase in the number of (unassigned) ports PRs and a slight decrease in the number of commits made.

In the last quarter, we welcomed Felix Palmen (zirias@) as a new ports committer, welcomed back Akinori MUSHA (knu@), and said goodbye to Olli Hauer (ohauer@). We also welcomed Luca Pizzamiglio (pizzamig@) as an official member of portmgr.

Some large changes in the Ports Tree were made during the last quarter:

The description of a port’s functionality should end with the URL of a web page that provides further information, such as best practices for usage or configuration. This information can be displayed with pkg query -e for installed packages or pkg rquery -e for available packages. The URL used to be appended to the end of the ports' pkg-descr files, with the prefix "WWW: ", so that tools could extract the URL from the description. Over time, many of these URLs have become stale, since port updates generally change only the Makefile, not the pkg-descr file. By moving the definition of these URLs into the Makefiles, maintainers are more likely to update the URL along with other port changes, and tools have easier access to them. The URLs are now assigned to the WWW macro in the Makefile and can be queried with make -V WWW in the port directory. Tools that process the description contained in the package files still work because the "WWW: " lines at the end are generated from the WWW values in the Makefiles.

During EuroBSDCon, portmgr@ had a discussion about improving the situation for kernel module packages. Various possibilities have been discussed.

The following happened under the hood: