Re: An alarming trend (no it's not flaimbait.) (fwd)
Brian, I understand your complaints. It bugs me, too, to find
software not maintained well. We are volunteers, though, and as you
realize, it takes a lot of time to do this, and so it happens, on
occasion that someone just can't keep up. I don't think it's really
fair of people to tell you "hey, see if you can do it better", as you
may not have the free time to work on something, let alone jump
through the beaurocratic hoops that Debian places in the way of people
who want to help. If you don't have the time, you'll probably end up
not maintaining it well either;-)
As was stated elsewhere, the best way you can make a meaningful
contribution is to file bugs that are "higher level" than "normal", in
order to draw attention to broken packages. Even this will take you
some time to do properly, as you should read through the existing
reports in order to avoid duplicates. However, it's a very valuable
service. I know I appreciate finding that someone has already
reported a problem, and by doing so, possibly blocking buggy software
from going into 'testing' or being released.
Thanks for your time, and happy Debian'ing,
--
David N. Welton
Consulting: http://www.dedasys.com/
Free Software: http://people.debian.org/~davidw/
Apache Tcl: http://tcl.apache.org/
Personal: http://www.efn.org/~davidw/
Reply to: