Hi.
Andreas Metzler wrote:
> I was not "trying to be smart", I just tried to stop other people from
> replying and stating the obvious ("NMU is the last resort.", etc.)
With the assumption that you only want to give factual information the email
looks far better than I took it for. Sorry for ooverreacting.
Back to the facts, I think that the problem with "usual pointers" (orphaned
packages, bugs tagged help, debian-installer, rc bugs, man pages) are very broken:
Orphaned packages are (for the most part) orphaned because no one would ever
care. Fixing bugs is way out of reach: Most bugs are open because the maintainer
doesn't attribute attention to them, doesn't want to fix them, or solving them
is too difficult even for the people who know the package best (i.e. the
maintainer). Maintainers who don't care enough about about their bugs to fix
them most likely won't bother to review patches from outsiders. That was what my
example boils down to. Also, if one just goes about submitting bug patches,
who'll be an advocate when it comes to applying?
IMHO Debian should develop a way of
a) systematically pushing bug fixes even for non-rc bugs
i.e. maybe have a list of bugs tagged "patch" and a policy that NMU's are
admissible if a maintainer has gone X week without any comment on a patch,
even when it's not rc
b) collecting the work applicants do on bugs
or accept that fixing bugs is not something non-maintainers will be helping out
with.
For manpages point b) certainly applies. Also, it suffers the same problem as
orphaned packages: It's thoroughly unattractive, which is why people claiming to
maintain packages don't care about them.
Cheers
T.
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