Re: DEX ancient-patches: where the rubber meets the road

[Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah@jeremiahfoster.com>]

On Mar 31, 2011, at 14:03, Kel Modderman wrote:

> On Wednesday 30 March 2011 23:42:11 Matt Zimmerman wrote:
>> * http://people.ubuntu.com/patches/sysvinit-quietinit.patch
>>  Debian bug: http://bugs.debian.org/326677
>>  Thread: http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2011/03/msg00052.html
>> 
>>  I think this patch is unnecessary in Debian, but it was filed in the BTS
>>  by someone else (Petter Reinholdtsen), so I was hesitant to close it
>>  myself.  Instead, I emailed Petter about a week ago and asked whether he
>>  wanted to merge the patch or discard it.  I haven't heard back from him
>>  yet.
>> 
>>  I think this patch is obsolete from a DEX perspective anyway, because the
>>  patch is no longer in Ubuntu.  Does anyone feel there is value in
>>  continuing to track it, or should we forget about it?
> 
> There are probably lots of more important things for the sysvinit maintainers
> to work on, and I don't see much benefit in spending time on this patch ...
> so I'd say drop it.

I think this is a way to deal with the bug, but it still seems not to address the main issue as I see it: how to resolve outstanding patches from derivatives in Debian. 

This is more of a 'process' issue, hence Matt's metaphor of "where the rubber meets the road." And while just closing this bug might work in this instance, it certainly won't in all instances. 

What about a tentative NMU? Could one create an NMU fix and then forward it to the maintainer(s) and say something like: "We've identified an outstanding patch to a bug in Debian from a derivative. We've provided a {patch,new package} for you. We'd like to close this bug so we propose an upload to the archive by the maintainer of this new package. If this cannot be done, simply reply to DEX and it will be done for you as an NMU. Also, since this bug is considered an outstanding issue, we'll go ahead with an NMU after $reasonable_time. Thanks for your help."

Is this process of contacting the maintainer and making life as easy as possible a reasonable way to go? Even if there is an NMU at the end? Or would this be considered bad form?

Regards,

Jeremiah