Am 06.08.2009, 22:22 Uhr, schrieb Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@madism.org>:
On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 04:25:47PM +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:[Please Cc: replies back to me, I'm not on debian-project@]FWIW, this is an excellent mail, and I share many of your opinions and hindsights here. Note that by your count Debian isn't always a good player with upstreams, I'm pretty sure you will find rotting bugs in the Debian BTS on your packages too ;)
Definitely, but I consider myself lucky that the current Debian packagers of my upstream projects are quite good at taking the relevant issues upstream and being responsive and helpful if needed, so at least I'm/we're aware upstream and can see if issues are reported from one end user as a random finding, or if constant streams of reports come from various places.
Rotting bugs? Indeed there are some. In doubt, I prefer keeping stable versions going over abandoning them for a development version that is going to be finished many a year in the future. It's annoying to see this "if I could overhaul subsystem X and Y, I could finally fix bug 12345" while receiving bug reports or browsing the trackers, but it avoids the far bigger annoyance of letting an old stable version rot and not having a new devel version stable yet -- that would be a real PITN for both end users and downstream distros.
-- Matthias Andree