When you notice that a port is out of date compared to the
latest version from the original authors, first make sure you
have the latest port. You can find them in the
ports/ports-current directory of the ftp mirror sites.
The next step is to send a mail to the maintainer, if one is listed in the port's Makefile. That person may already be working on an upgrade, or have a reason to not upgrade the port right now (because of, for example, stability problems of the new version).
If the maintainer asks you to do the upgrade or there isn't
any such person to begin with, please make the upgrade and
send the recursive diff (either unified or context diff is
fine, but port committers appear to prefer unified diff more)
of the new and old ports directories
to us (e.g., if your modified port directory is called
`superedit' and the original as in our tree is
`superedit.bak', then send us the result of `diff
-ruN superedit.bak superedit'). Please examine the output
to make sure all the changes make sense. The best way to send
us the diff is by including it to send-pr(1) (category
`ports'). Please
mention any added or deleted files in the message, as they
have to be explicitly specified to CVS when doing a commit.
If the diff is more than about 20KB, please compress and
uuencode it; otherwise, just include it in as is in the PR.
Once again, please use diff(1) and not shar(1) to send updates to ports.