These web pages are being written by Garance Drosehn (aka gad@FreeBSD.org). This proposal is based on some ideas I had back when several people were working hard to move the pkg-comment file for each port into the Makefile for that port. (That was a also project to reduce the inode count of the ports project...) That project was completed well before I had made enough progress on my ideas to talk about them. All I had were "some ideas", and the obvious fact that it would take a lot of work to implement those ideas. I didn't want to bother people with those ideas until I had at done least some of the necessary work.

Recently, a friend of mine had completed his Phd from the CompSci department, and he is temporarily available for working on some of the projects that I was not finding the time to do. He is Darren Lim. He is doing most of the actual work, based on my ideas. We are not sure how much longer he will be available for working on this, which is why I wanted to tackle a "short-term, easier" project instead of some ambitious plan to solve every problem in the ports collection that anyone has ever thought of.

We hope to finish enough of the work on this to make the proposal at least feasible to consider. If ports-developers are not interested in this project, then we will certainly just drop it. If ports-developers do believe that this project is worth doing, then we will try to accomplish as much work as we can, as long as Darren has the time to work on it. Me -- I never have any time, or at least not enough for something this ambitious!

I might also be able to get some help from other students or alumni of RPI. There are a few who have expressed interest in this project, but are waiting for me to finish these web pages so they can see where they might be able to help out.