Getting in Touch With Us
12 | 13 |There are a number of ways in which you can get in contact with people involved with The MacPorts Project, depending 14 | on who you need to contact and the type of support and/or feedback you're looking for:
15 | 16 |-
17 |
- Public Mailing Lists 18 |
- Administrative Contact 19 |
- Bug Reports & Contributions 20 |
- IRC 21 |
- Individuals 22 |
Getting Help
26 | 27 |If you're looking for help to troubleshoot a particular failure installing or using MacPorts, providing us with as 28 | much information about your host platform as you can gather will help us help you in turn to look into the problem. 29 | The following simple steps comprise our recommended procedure to obtain support:
30 | 31 |-
32 |
- First and foremost, check the MacPorts Documentation, man pages, FAQ and problems hotlist. 35 |
- Second, check the archives of the appropriate mailing list you intend to post to (below) to see if your question 36 | has already been asked and dealt with. 37 |
- Finally, if you still haven't found the answer to your problem, send e-mail to the appropriate mailing list
38 | with the following information:
39 |
-
40 |
- output generated by the “port” command's -v (verbose) or -d 41 | (debug) flags; 42 |
- platform details such as operating system version (e.g. 10.4.10), hardware architecture (e.g. Intel 43 | or PowerPC), and the version of Xcode installed -- the “sw_vers” and “uname -a” commands are of 44 | great help in this regard; 45 |
- any third party software that may exist in places such as /usr/local and/or /sw. 46 | 47 |
49 |
Public Mailing Lists
53 | 54 |The MacPorts Project hosts a number of specialized mailing lists you can freely subscribe to:
55 | 56 |-
57 |
- MacPorts Users
58 | (archives):
59 |
General discussion of MacPorts installation and usage. A moderate volume list.
60 |
61 | - MacPorts Developers
62 | (archives):
63 |
Where project members and contributors discuss the MacPorts “base” system itself and future 64 | development plans, and related “Portfile” writing best practices. A low volume list.
65 |
66 | - MacPorts Changes
67 | (archives):
68 |
Read-only, low to moderate volume list of changes to our git repository on GitHub 69 | for both “base” code and Portfiles, among others.
70 |
71 | - MacPorts Builds
72 | (archives):
73 |
Read-only, moderate volume list with build notifications from our Buildbot 74 | .
75 |
76 | - MacPorts Tickets
77 | (archives):
78 |
Read-only, moderate volume list of ticket activity on our Trac bug tracker 79 | .
80 |
81 | - MacPorts Announce
82 | (archives):
83 |
Read-only, low volume list for project related major announcements.
84 |
85 |
Note that due to spam control policies you must subscribe to our non read-only lists in order to post to any of them. 88 | This does not mean that you have to receive all messages from the list, as you can turn off mail delivery 89 | in your settings after subscribing.
90 | 91 |Members are expected to abide by the very simple Netiquette guidelines 92 | that are common to most open forums when posting; of particular relevance is sticking to plain text messages, our language 93 | of choice (English), and reducing the number and size of attachments in any way possible (e.g, by using paste bins such 94 | as GitHub Gist and passing along the paste URL rather than full error messages).
95 | 96 | 97 |Administrative Contact
98 | 99 |The private and read-only “” mailing 100 | list is where you should send mail to in case you need to get in touch with the The MacPorts Project's management team (A.K.A. “PortMgr”), in case you have any administrative 102 | request or if you wish to discuss anything you might feel is of private nature (like the interaction between MacPorts and 103 | NDA'd software).
104 | 105 |This is also where you should turn to if you are a developer and/or a contributor interested in joning The MacPorts 106 | Project with full write access to our git repository and Wiki pages, either to work on MacPorts itself or as a ports 107 | maintainer. Please read the documentation available 108 | on joining for more information.
109 | 110 | 111 |Bug Tracker
112 | 113 |We use the popular Trac web-based tool for our bug tracking and Wiki needs, thus buying ourselves 115 | seamless read-only integration with our git repository through its 116 | source browser and the project timeline (where ticket activity 117 | can also be viewed). Note that in order to interact with Trac for anything other than read only operations, you need 118 | to register with GitHub for an account.
119 | 120 |If you think you've found a bug either in one of our available ports or in MacPorts itself, or 121 | on the other hand if you'd like to make a contribution of any kind to the project, feel free to open a ticket to help us look into the problem and/or submission. Please keep in mind that we 123 | usually get a fairly high number of duplicate reports for common problems and therefore appreciate any help we can get in 124 | the process of streamlining our ticket duties. Searching the Trac database 125 | & mailing list archives (above), and reading our FAQ & 126 | problems hotlist to see if your report has already been filed 127 | is recommended, as well as reading the ticketing guidelines 128 | that will help you create a better report.
129 | 130 |Viewing existing tickets through the facilities offered by predefined and custom ticket reports that allow for detailed queries is also available.
132 | 133 | 134 |IRC
135 | 136 |For a more real-time discussion of any MacPorts related topic, the
137 | #MacPorts
channel on Libera Chat is where some of us usually hang out,
138 | MacPorts developers and community members alike. Everyone is free and welcomed to join us, whether for a random
139 | fun conversation or a productive troubleshooting session, but please keep in mind that no one is guaranteed to be
140 | around at any particular moment and that channel members are not obligated to answer your questions. If you fail to
141 | get traction at any time, do not take it personally and simply direct your questions to the mailing lists instead.
The language of choice for the IRC channel is also English, for obvious reasons of universality, so sticking to it
144 | is appreciated. The IRC channel also receives a message for every commit made in the MacPorts project from a user
145 | called mplog
. Feel free to ignore those messages.
If you would like a web-based interface to the IRC channel, one option is 148 | KiwiIRC. Note that it is operated by a third party.
149 | 150 |An alternative real-time discussion platform is Matrix. MacPorts' channel on the Matrix network is #macports:matrix.org
. It preserves chatting
152 | history, so users without an IRC bouncer might prefer this. Matrix is a globally federated protocol, an account on
153 | a Matrix homeserver is required to join. See the Matrix Foundation's Try
154 | Matrix page for an introduction on how to get one.
We formerly had a #MacPorts
channel on the Freenode IRC network. While the channel may still exist there, it is no
157 | longer an official channel for the MacPorts project.
Individuals
160 | 161 |To find out who the people behind MacPorts are and what they are up to, visit the team members page on our Wiki.
163 | 164 |