# How can I tell if a port is unmaintained?



## stefanlasiewski (Jul 30, 2012)

How can I tell if a FreeBSD port is unmaintained? 

The port in question is mail/mailman. According to the post http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2011-July/068861.html from Chris Rees (Maintainer of mail/sympa), "Mailman is unmaintained".

I see the following tools, but I am not quite sure what criteria are used to determine that a port is 'unmaintained' vs. "The person who maintains this port just had a baby/found a new job/taking a sabbatical and will be busy for a few months".

http://portsmon.freebsd.org/portsprsunmaintained.py

Is there something I should look for in the Makefile or pkg-descr?  In the Makefile for mail/mailman, I see that "MAINTAINER=  ports@FreeBSD.org". Does that mean that the port is considered "Unmaintained"?


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## culot@ (Jul 30, 2012)

Hi,

according to the handbook (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-broken.html):



> ports shown as maintained by <ports@FreeBSD.org> are actually not maintained by anyone. Fixes and support, if any, come from the general community



From my own experience as a ports committer, I sometimes commit updates to such ports, but usually when I am done working on my own ports and waiting PRs. So while it is not strictly true that ports belonging to ports@ are not maintained, they are not given the same care as others.

Hence to find the list of those unmaintained ports, you could simply go to /usr/ports and issue '*make maintainer*', or go to the following page: http://portscout.freebsd.org/ports@freebsd.org.html

Regards,
Frederic


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