Yes, it's useful to contact FreeBSD ports maintainers
Context
I kept having newsboat, the RSS reader I'm using, to coredump upon exiting.
A quick search led me to a thread on the FreeBSD forums, where it was confirmed that this bug was fixed in version 2.37.0 of Newsboat.
Sadly, the version shipped by FreeBSD is 2.36.0.
Contacting the port maintainer
So I checked who the maintainer for that port was, and emailed him.
Marko (that's his firstname) answered quickly, and confirmed that he submitted a merge report.
A few days later, I saw that the merged had been done.
Updating
Doing my usual pkg update did nothing, I was still stuck on 2.36.0
Then I realised that while the port had been updated, the package was on a different branch, since I was on the default FreeBSD package branch, i.e. quarterly.
Fortunately, the FreeBSD handbook has a section about it, which explains how to switch to Latest.
Once done, and after a pkg update -f && pkg upgrade, I got:
√ ~ % newsboat -v
Newsboat 2.37.0 - https://newsboat.org/
BOOM! No more coredump! =)
Tags: FreeBSD