As a contributor, I observed noticeably slow responses to patches around platforms apart from Darwin and Linux, even for trivial ones. This could be a result of multiple factors:
- new platform maintainers often don’t have commit access;
- there’s no platform manager so non-trivial changes are not easily evaluated;
- there’s no CI or testing infrastructure so others don’t know if it actually works;
- …
This, however, becomes a blocker for new official platform support, even if the port is pretty mature. It will take time for us to smooth out these issues by letting a specific group of people to handle it officially. (And yes, CI costs, and we’re clearly in short of it. I’m not sure if funding can help, but that’s important for new ports…)
And like how SSWG tracks its own project and evaluates others regularly, SPWG will track the state of each unofficial port, including maturity, popularity and upstreaming process, so interested users can see the progress in a more direct way.