Re: Support on fixing bugs.

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

Torsten Landschoff <t.landschoff@gmx.net> wrote:
> He told me that he will probably have enough time again in the future but he
> would give me the ppp-package if I am using it heavily. I think he has still
> better possibilities to test the package at an ISP...

Well, I'm not an ISP (I work for myself as a consultant, mostly doing freeware 
support) but I do work for a couple of ISP's on occasion, so it sounds like
I'm still in the best position to sort this out (once I get my act together).

The problem is that I've had too many people trying to pay me to do things 
other than Debian recently.  These things are sent to try us.   ;-)

> > However you are probably correct that there are too many bugs.  But also =
> there
> > are a lot of bugs that are *very* difficult to reproduce, understand and =
> to fix.
> > Of course, there are also a lot of bugs that are easy to fix where the
> > maintainer just lacks maintenance for his package(s).
> 
> This is exactly the problem I see. I think it does not really matter if we
> have a minor bug which was inherited from the upstream source, but many bugs
> are only packaging issues...

and as you pointed out in the case of PPP, many of the bugs in the BTS were 
fixed in the package (a combination of mild incompetence on my part, and the
fact that ppp 2.2 was still in use, and we didn't have a ``fixed'' priority
at the time, and I wanted to keep a reference to the bugs around).

> Yes, but it is working perfectly. I did not notice all the bugs in using it=
>  :)

I suppose that's better than no bugs and not working :)

Cheers, Phil.