erwin@ committed http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=149657, based on work by dougb@ and rene@.  It deprecates the use of md5 checksums in distinfo.  So here on in, when you run make makesum, the md5 will no longer be generated, only the sha256 checksum.
Existing distinfo containing md5 info will silently be ignored.  So at this time there is no need re-create distinfo for the sake of removing it, just allow the regular flow of ports updates take care of it.
The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wishes to remind users that November 30
is also the end of support for the Ports Collection for both FreeBSD 6.4
RELEASE and the FreeBSD 6.x STABLE branch. Â Neither the infrastructure nor
individual ports are guaranteed to work on these FreeBSD versions after
that date. Â A CVS tag will be created for users who cannot upgrade for some
reason, at which time these users are advised to stop tracking the latest
ports CVS repository and use the RELEASE_6_EOL tag instead.
While many people still use RELENG_6, it is at the end of it’s development
cycle. The Ports Management team has set the following policies with regard
to EOL/EOS of this branch and we kindly ask developers to implement these:
- We will keep building 6.4 packages as long as we have the resources.
6.x package builds will however be deprioritised, meaning they will not
be rebuilt as frequently.
- We will continue to support the 6.x infrastructure until RELENG_6
EOL (11/30/2010) by building the INDEX on RELENG_6 for use by ‘make
fetchindex’, and making sure that the ports collection infrastructure
(bsd.port.mk, etc) continues to function on RELENG_6, subject to the
reduced testing that this branch will receive. Â This means that problems
may be noticed only after the fact and may require community support to
develop and test fixes.
- We do not require committers/maintainers to support 6.x, but ports
will need to be marked BROKEN/IGNORE if they do not build/run.
- Port maintainers are strongly encouraged to accept patches from the
community that allow their ports to build and run on 6.x. Â However,
since running on 6.x is no longer a requirement, maintainers may use
their discretion in cases where a proposed patch would be disruptive
to other supported FreeBSD branches, or would unreasonably impede
ongoing maintenance of the port.
- We will continue to accept patches for ports collection infrastructure
(bsd.port.mk, etc)
- We encourage all users and developers to migrate to the FreeBSD 7.x or
8.x branch, both of which is a stable and mature platform, and are now
the ‘reference’ branches for the ports collection.
Please also see the secteam@ announcement,
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2010-September/001344.html
In preparation for 8.1-RELEASE, the ports tree is now in feature freeze.
Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches are allowed without prior approval but with the extra Feature safe: yes tag in the commit message. Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with unusually high number of dependent ports, and any other commit that requires the rebuilding of many packages is not allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr after that date.
When in doubt, please do not hesitate to contact portmgr.
Just in case you missed it on the mailing list, http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2010-June/061882.html, the tentative date for Feature Freeze will be June 18, noonish UTC.
In preparation for 8.1-RELEASE, the ports tree will be in feature freeze after release candidate 1 (RC1) is released, currently planned for June 11.
If you have any commits with high impact planned, get them in the tree before then and if they require an experimental build, have a request for one in portmgr@ hands within the next few days.
Note that this again will be a feature freeze and not a full freeze. Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches will be allowed without prior approval but with the extra Feature safe: yes tag in the commit message.  Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with unusually high number of dependencies, and any other commit that requires the rebuilding of many packages will not be allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr@ after that date.
Howdy Guys,
Few Weeks ago i wrote that i’ve got a job offer in Kuala Lumpur,
I got this Job now and unfortunately now I need now to reorder my
life a bit. So first step is now to step down from KDE, Gecko
and vbox teams. I am not really happy about this step but sometimes
priorities goes to new state and we have to reorder something.
I’ll spend my time more to portmgr stuff, mentoring fresh
Blood, Gnats cleanup’s and committing any good stuff. I’d like
to say many thanks for all the nice time in these teams 
.
- Martin
First I’d like to start this post by thanking the FreeBSD Foundation for funding my trip. I’ve been contemplating attending BSDCan for years and without their financial support I would have missed it this year again.
I’ve been a FreeBSD ports committer since 2006. In 2007, my commit privileges were extended to the src tree. In 2008, Pav approached me to become part of the Ports Management Team.
I’ve had the chance to meet up with a few people (Ed Maste, Garrett Cooper, Tim Kientzle) and discuss the coordination of the work that is being done and will be done on package tools as part of Google Summer of Code. During the developer summit, Mark Linimon, Erwin Lansing and myself held a discussion about the current state of packages and how to improve the user experience. A few people offered suggestions and portmgr took good note of them. I did take some time to go through the problem reports assigned to portmgr. I also attended a chat about FreeBSD mirrors along with some members of core, admins and portmgr.
There were a lot of interesting talks during the conference and obviously choices had to be made on which ones I would go see. I really enjoyed Will Backman’s keynote. The talk about the PCBSD installer was very interesting and it looked like there could be a drop-in replacement for sysinstall in the very near future. Lawrance Stewart’s talk was a good summary of what tools to use when doing FreeBSD developement work.
BSDCan 2010 was a great time, I really enjoyed it and I feel it was time spent in a productive fashion. I would like to thank the following people: Dan Langille and his volunteers for the brilliant conference they put together, Sam Leffler / Philip Paeps / Gavin Atkinson / Jonathan Anderson for sharing a room with me, Jordan Hubbard for a memorable meal in the Works Burger in Glebe and Kevin Van Vechten for the invaluable insight on American Sports and the FreeBSD Foundation, once again, for sponsoring my trip.
Attending conferences makes the difference between being a contributor and being part of a community. It is the perfect opportunity to meet new people with similar interests, meet people you’ve been exchanging emails with (putting a face on a name) and make sure you stay updated with the works in progress.
During the month of May, we were fortunate enough to see the return of two old committers. Â Marc Fournier, aka scrappy@, well known for http://www.bsdstats.org, and Ade Lovett, aka ade@, aka Mr. Autotools.
Please feel free to drop them a note to say welcome back 
On behalf of portmgr, I am pleased to announce that portmgr has found a new secretary: Thomas Abthorpe. Thomas has been a FreeBSD ports committer since 2007 and has made more than 1000 commits since. He has previously served on the ports-security team and is currently a member of the KDE and donation teams. He has also mentored several new ports committers over the years.
In his role as portmgr secretary, Thomas will help portmgr keep track of ongoing issues, keeps the portmgr, and other bookkeeping work like organizing votes and stay in touch with other FreeBSD teams.
Please welcome him onboard!
The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed. Until 7.3 is released, sweeping commits still need explicit approval from portmgr to assure that tags can be slipped for potential security issues. For more information what constitutes a sweeping change, see the portmgr web pages.
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In preparation for 7.3-RELEASE, the ports tree is now in feature freeze.
Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches are allowed without prior approval but with the extra Feature safe: yes tag in the commit message. Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with unusually high number of dependent ports, and any other commit that requires the rebuilding of many packages is not allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr after that date.
When in doubt, please do not hesitate to contact portmgr.
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In preparation for 7.3-RELEASE, the ports tree will be in feature freeze after release candidate 1 (RC1 )is released, currently planned for February 8.
If you have any commits with high impact planned, get them in the tree before then and if they require an experimental build, have a request for one in portmgr hands within the next few days.
Note that this again will be a feature freeze and not a full freeze. Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches will be allowed without prior approval but with the extra Feature safe: yes tag in the commit message. Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with unusually high number of dependencies, and any other commit that requires the rebuilding of many packages will not be allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr after that date.
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The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed.  Until 8.0 is released, sweeping commits still need explicit approval from portmgr to assure that tags can be slipped for potential security issues.  For more information what constitutes a sweeping change, see the portmgr web pages.
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As an experiment, there will not be a complete ports freeze ahead of the release of 8.0.  To ensure that the tree is kept in a stable condition, we do need to have more discipline about the feature freeze we are currently using.  To achieve this, I have added a new tag to the commit log Feature safe: which needs to be set to yes explicitly for each commit.  While this is is tedious, it does mean that commits will be allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr.  Portmgr is still working on a written set of rules for what is and isn’t allowed during a feature freeze, so please use common sense for now, and try to err on the side of caution and contact portmgr when in any doubt.  Sweeping commits touching a large number of ports, shared library updates affect more than a trivial number of ports, you get the picture; anything that would require a rebuild of more than a trivial amount of ports is not allowed without prior approval from portmgr.  With the release only a few weeks off, we cannot afford any major mishaps, so be conservative.
The feature freeze is enforced from right now and current plan is to tag the tree after RC1 is released.  There will be a short freeze while the tag is processed, and after that we will proceed with the ports slush as usual.
Please consider your commits in this light and help make this experiment a success so we can avoid long freezes for future releases.
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Earlier today, Ken Smith bumped the version of the HEAD sources to 9.0. Â I have just modified the scripts to make INDEX-8 based on RELENG_8 and add support for INDEX-9 based on HEAD. Â They are available for ‘make fetchindex’ now. Â Mark Linimon is working on adding 9 to the pointyhat scripts, so expect the first 9-current packages to be available later this week.
Packages for the release of 8.0 have been built for i386 and amd64, with a few days to go for sparc64. Â They are currently not available on the mirrors yet, but will be included on the BETA3 cd sets. Â Please give them as much testing as you can. Â With the first iterations of the package sets already finished, we are currently in a soft feature freeze, and if no major changes appear, we do expect to keep the freeze very short. Â Although the exact date is dependent on how the release progress in general progresses, it is currently expected to start at September 14 and last for two weeks. Â Please don’t hesitate to contact portmgr@ if you have any questions or doubts whether a given change would be too big for the feature freeze.
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Below is the tentative schedule for the ports freeze in preparation for 8.0-RELEASE. If any major delays occur in the overall release schedule, the dates may be postponed, but please start preparing to have your changed committed to the tree before August 17 to ensure they are included in the release. Also, portmgr kindly asks anyone who has anything major lined up to already from today start mailing portmgr about these so we know what to expect and not be surprised by any major fallout that might extend the short freeze we have planned.
August 17: ports tree is frozen and package build begin
August 24: ports tree is thawed and final package builds begin
August 31: FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE is released and ports tree is unfrozen
Portmgr is happy to announce that two new members will join the team.
Martin Wilke has been one of our most active committers since receiving his commit bit today 3 years ago. He has been working in a number of subgroups including python, ports-security and the KDE team.
Ion-Mihai Tetcu has been interested in regression testing and qualitiy assurance, creating QAT automated tinderbox testing of all port commits on a per-commit basis, and adding on-the-fly feedback to the snapshot builds from the pointyhat package cluster.
Unfortunately, we will also be saying goodbye to Kirill Ponomarew, who hasn’t had much time to spend on FreeBSD and will be stepping down from portmgr.
We thank Kirill for all his contributions in the past and wish Martin and Ion-Mihai the best of luck with the new tasks bestowed upon them.
The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed. Until 7.2 is released, sweeping commits still need explicit approval from portmgr to assure that tags can be slipped for potential security issues. For more information what constitutes a sweeping change, see the portmgr web pages.