On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Anders [iso-8859-15] Ellenshøj Andersen wrote:
And developers do give up on fixing bugs in their packages. It's tough, but it's a fact of life. People should be at least encouraged, if not required, to report certain types of bugs upstream, since reporting them to the debian developers is just useless. Many of them don't have a clue how the application they a packaging works, they just compile it and package it for Debian.
I have seen this issue come up at least a couple of times over the years and as close to a consensus I've seen is that users should report to Debian, the DD should report upstream (with a patch if possible) when it is an upstream bug.
I figure that if a package is good enough it will attract talent and live (regardless of the state of any bug reporting systems), if not, it will get too buggy and eventually die.
As far as clueless developers go... just as there is a wide range of conditions and situation packages can be in (good->bad, old->new, supported->unsupported), there is the same range of developer and maintainer conditions and situations - ya pretty much gotta take it on a case by case basis. We can take some solace in that really bad ones will eventually disappear or their packages will be passed onto someone or some group which has a clue (i.e., they will attract talent).
Debian's infrastructure works the same way, whether the talent it attracts is a DD. Maintainer, or user... in fact, last I heard, the fastest way to become a DD is to do something useful to the Project and demonstrate your ability to be responsible by managing and maintaining it.
- Bruce