follow-up to early Q about package maintainers

I apologize for coming back to this, but I have - I hope this time - a more constructive question: where do I find a quick tutorial on how to use and possibly help the macports process of package maintenance and updating? I am not a programmer, so I won;t be able to produce source from scratch, but I can find my way around code (having helped source code maintenance, at least as tester, for some network stuff for macosx - mostly informal) enough to lend a hand, at least with testing and ticket updates ... TIA, Stefan P.S. I am dying for the libpcap fix - my expertise is in network (and associated security) and without this one properly done majority of my tools are practically useless