mozilla.org and ports

The following comment was made on Bug#204177:

 > BeOS, VMS, and OS2 are not officially supported by mozilla.org (they
 > are ports).  we try not to bust the ports, but we try even harder not 
to bust
 > the primary platforms.  it simply can't be the job of every developer to
 > maintain the ports.  we can all try, but it can't be our first priority.
 > blocker status seems misused if only the ports are busted.  moreover, 
your
 > development is not hindered... you can add --disable-profilesharing 
to your
 > mozconfig.  so, why don't you help out with the patch (since you are 
capable of
 > testing on BeOS) instead of fussing over the status of this bug?

I understand that BeOS is not officially supported, but, a little 
concideration would be nice.  The IPC bug is not the first time, that 
certain parts of mozilla that are new features, have just been "turned 
on", which breaks the ports.  I am the primary developer of the BeOS 
port, and, was never informed about the fact that this change was going 
to be implemented.  This is a volunteer project, we do not have paid 
developers to work on the port.  But, people do somewhat depend on 
myself and a couple others, to make sure that the beos port is 
maintained, and, improved.  I don't mind having to do the work to fix 
the BeOS port, even though timeless beat me to it for this one.  But I 
had started working on it, without knowing of timeless's work.  The 
thing is, that I had to drop the other work I was doing, to fix this. 
If I would have known ahead of time, I could have set time aside, and 
started looking into the issue, before it became a problem.

Now, there may be a mailing list or forum that might have announced it, 
but, with the amount of junk mail I get everyday, I don't need more 
email.  Most of the mailing lists/newsgroups where I would expect this 
information to be posted, if it was, though I can't find it, are used to 
the point, that I just don't have the time to monitor them.  Might I 
suggest a low-volume developer-announce mailing list, that is read-only, 
to keep the volume low.  This way, when major changes are going to be 
made, the people that care to be informed, can be?  At least something, 
because the current management of the tree, as far as working with 
outside developers, is really rather poor, to the point where I could 
see it discouraging further ports, if it hasn't already.


-paul
arougthopher_at_lizardland_dot_net