The pine base64 bug - policy
The maintainer agreed with me (in the bug logs) that it _was_ a bug,
and has apparently retracted this now. My definition of a bug would
be something that is not as it *should* be, where should is according
to technical merit, our policies, &c. If we are to have an argument
about what the behaviour of pine ought to be then we ought to do so,
CC'ing the relevant bug report, until we have reached consensus about
what ought to be done or it can't be resolved.
However, the fact that this is a non-free package, that the upstream
authors disagree, that the bug could be documented or that it's hard
to fix do _not_ mean that the program is as it ought to be. The
upstream authors are not always right, and we should feel free to
question their decisions. Non-free packages can have bugs, and in
Pine's case we can ship a change if we want to. Documenting a bug
does not make it not a bug; hopefully we can all agree on that ?
For example, several people have complained about dpkg-source's
behaviour when it packs up an existing foo-n.nn.orig directory into a
.orig.tar.gz and removes the directory. I happen to feel that this is
the sensible default, and we have had arguments about it, but the fact
that this default behaviour is documented would not in itself justify
it.
The fact that the upstream authors have been informed about this bug
means that it should be marked `forwarded'. This will stop the nag
messages.
Ian.
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