I would like to announce that I'm no longer going to be personally 
updating or adding new mods to the openmw package repository. This is 
something which has been the case for some time already as I've spent 
less time on that and more time dealing with issues and improving 
Portmod itself.

This has been some time coming, but I wanted to make some improvements 
to the documentation before making this announcement.

While I probably could continue as before, the reality has always been 
that Portmod's long-term survival is tied to its community, or lack thereof.
Portmod is a tool which above all is meant to reduce the amount of time 
required to deal with mod installation and compatibility issues. However 
someone still always needs to spend some time getting things to work the 
first time, and the more people involved, the less any individual has to 
do. For the health of Portmod's repositories long-term, it would be 
better to think of Portmod as a collaborative tool for sharing mod 
installation and configuration details, rather than a tool for 
installing mods which other people have packaged.

To make things clear, this is really just a shift in attitude. The only 
change to portmod which will occur, if any, is to clarify certain things 
in its documentation. I'm not going to start restricting features to 
contributors or anything like that; portmod will always be completely 
Free and Open Source software.

I would also like to emphasise that a long-term commitment is not 
necessary when contributing. One-time contributions updating or adding 
packages are always welcome.

Details about contributing to the openmw mod package repository can be 
found at 
https://gitlab.com/portmod/openmw-mods/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md.

I also understand that contribution is probably more difficult than it 
could be, and is often hindered by confusing or missing documentation 
and the lack of tools to simplify things, even if it's not clear what 
exactly those tools should be. As such, I would like to also extend an 
appeal for contributions to Portmod's documentation, even if they are as 
simple as reporting where documentation is lacking. Documentation issues 
for Portmod's main documentation 
(https://portmod.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) can be opened on the main 
issue tracker, and the wiki has its own issue tracker: 
https://gitlab.com/portmod/portmod-wiki/-/issues (rarely used so far).

I will also try to reach out and advertise portmod a little more, as a 
larger community would also help with keeping things maintained. Help 
with that would also be appreciated.

Benjamin Winger