Getting in Touch With Us

There are a number of ways in which you can get in contact with people involved with The MacPorts Project, depending on who you need to contact and the type of support and/or feedback you're looking for:

Getting Help

If you're looking for help to troubleshoot a particular failure installing or using MacPorts, providing us with as much information about your host platform as you can gather will help us help you in turn to look into the problem. The following simple steps comprise our recommended procedure to obtain support:

  1. First and foremost, check the MacPorts Documentation, man pages, FAQ and problems hotlist.
  2. Second, check the archives of the appropriate mailing list you intend to post to (below) to see if your question has already been asked and dealt with.
  3. Finally, if you still haven't found the answer to your problem, send e-mail to the appropriate mailing list with the following information:
    • output generated by the “port” command's -v (verbose) or -d (debug) flags;
    • platform details such as operating system version (e.g. 10.4.10), hardware architecture (e.g. Intel or PowerPC), and the version of Xcode installed -- the “sw_vers” and “uname -a” commands are of great help in this regard;
    • any third party software that may exist in places such as /usr/local and/or /sw.

Public Mailing Lists

The MacPorts Project hosts a number of specialized mailing lists you can freely subscribe to:

Note that due to spam control policies you must subscribe to our non read-only lists in order to post to any of them. Members are expected to abide by the very simple Netiquette guidelines that are common to most open forums when posting; of particular relevance is sticking to plain text messages, our language of choice (English), and reducing the number and size of attachments in any way possible (e.g, by using paste bins such as lisppaste or Pastie and passing along the paste URL rather than full error messages).

Administrative Contact

The private and read-only “” mailing list is where you should send mail to in case you need to get in touch with the The MacPorts Project's management team (A.K.A. “PortMgr”), in case you have any administrative request or if you wish to discuss anything you might feel is of private nature (like the interaction between MacPorts and NDA'd software).

This is also where you should turn to if you are a developer and/or a contributor interested in joning The MacPorts Project with full write access to our SVN repository and Wiki pages, either to work on MacPorts itself or as a ports maintainer. Please read the documentation available on joining for more information.

Bug Tracker

We use the popular Trac web-based tool for our bug tracking and Wiki needs, thus buying ourselves seamless read-only integration with our SVN repository through its source browser and the project timeline (where ticket activity can also be viewed). Note that in order to interact with Trac for anything other than read only operations, you need to register with Mac OS Forge for a Wordpress/Trac combined account.

If you think you've found a bug either in one of our available ports or in MacPorts itself, or on the other hand if you'd like to make a contribution of any kind to the project, feel free to open a ticket to help us look into the problem and/or submission. Please keep in mind that we usually get a fairly high number of duplicate reports for common problems and therefore appreciate any help we can get in the process of streamlining our ticket duties. Searching the Trac database & mailing list archives (above), and reading our FAQ & problems hotlist to see if your report has already been filed is recommended, as well as reading the ticketing guidelines that will help you create a better report.

Viewing existing tickets through the facilities offered by predefined and custom ticket reports that allow for detailed queries is also available.

IRC

For a more real-time discussion of any MacPorts related topic, the #MacPorts channel on the Freenode network is where some of us usually hang out, MacPorts developers and community members alike. Everyone is free and welcomed to join us, even if it is for a random fun conversation or a productive troubleshooting session, but please keep in mind that no one is guaranteed to be around at any particular moment and that channel members are not obligated to answer your questions. If you fail to get any traction at time, do not take it personally and simply direct your questions to the mailing lists instead.

The language of choice for the IRC channel is also English, for obvious reasons of universality, so sticking to it is appreciated.

Individuals

To find out who the people behind MacPorts are and what they are up to, visit the team members page on our Wiki.