Bug#98312: Developer's Reference should be more explicit about forwarding of bugs
Package: developers-reference
Version: N/A; reported 2001-05-21
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch
I am concerned about the number of Debian developers who do not seem to
understand the need to forward bugs upstream. These developers complain when
they receive a bug report for an upstream bug, and often close the bug without
taking any action. It is clearly within the scope of a developer's duties to
forward such bugs upstream. To help raise awareness of this responsibility, I
have written a small patch (attached) to clarify the language in the
Developer's Reference.
-- System Information
Debian Release: unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux mizar 2.4.4 #2 Thu May 3 17:31:37 EDT 2001 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US
--
- mdz
diff -ru developers-reference-2.8.6/developers-reference.sgml developers-reference-2.8.6+mdz/developers-reference.sgml
--- developers-reference-2.8.6/developers-reference.sgml Fri Apr 13 03:30:43 2001
+++ developers-reference-2.8.6+mdz/developers-reference.sgml Mon May 21 18:11:16 2001
@@ -317,20 +317,19 @@
<sect id="upstream-coordination">Coordination With Upstream Developers
<p>
A big part of your job as Debian maintainer will be to stay in contact
-with the upstream developers since you'll have to share information that
-you get from the Bug Tracking System. It's not your job to fix non-Debian
-specific bugs.
-Rather, you have to forward these bugs to the upstream developers.
-(Of course, if you are able to do so, you may certainly fix them...)
-This way, the bug will hopefully
-be corrected when the next upstream version comes out.
+with the upstream developers. Debian users will sometimes report bugs
+to the Bug Tracking System that are not specific to Debian. You
+must forward these bug reports to the upstream developers so that
+they can be fixed in a future release. It's not your job to fix
+non-Debian specific bugs. However, if you are able to do so, you are
+encouraged to contribute to upstream development of the package by
+providing a fix for the bug. Debian users and developers will often
+submit patches to fix upstream bugs, and you should evaluate and
+forward these patches upstream.
<p>
-From time to
-time, you may get a patch attached to a bug report. You have to send the
-patch upstream and make sure that it gets included (if the authors accept
-the proposed fix). If you need to modify the upstream sources in order to
-build a policy conformant package, then you should propose a nice fix
-to the upstream developers which can be included there, so that you won't have to
+If you need to modify the upstream sources in order to build a policy
+conformant package, then you should propose a nice fix to the upstream
+developers which can be included there, so that you won't have to
modify the sources of the next upstream version. Whatever changes you
need, always try not to fork from the upstream sources.
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