Chapter 16. Keeping Up

One of the easiest ways to learn about updates that have already been committed is by subscribing to FreshPorts. Multiple ports can be monitored. Maintainers are strongly encouraged to subscribe, because they will receive notification of not only their own changes, but also any changes that any other FreeBSD committer has made. (These are often necessary to keep up with changes in the underlying ports framework—although it would be most polite to receive an advance heads-up from those committing such changes, sometimes this is overlooked or impractical. Also, in some cases, the changes are very minor in nature. We expect everyone to use their best judgement in these cases.)

To use FreshPorts, an account is required. Those with registered email addresses at @FreeBSD.org will see the opt-in link on the right-hand side of the web pages. Those who already have a FreshPorts account but are not using a @FreeBSD.org email address can change the email to @FreeBSD.org, subscribe, then change it back again.

FreshPorts also has a sanity test feature which automatically tests each commit to the FreeBSD ports tree. If subscribed to this service, a committer will receive notifications of any errors which FreshPorts detects during sanity testing of their commits.