Re: Two theses regarding packages
On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> 1. The maintainer is responible for the quality of his packages.
> He should try to fix bugs within a reasonable amount of time.
I can't say, that I'm really against this, but I'd like to emphasise a
different aspect of the problem.
IMO one of the main forces behind OSS and it's success is the "scratching
one's own itch" motive.
As is, Debian puts the person, which is the maintainer of a package very
much in the center. This perspective sometimes even seems to imply what
you are stating above. That is, to put it even more strongly: the
maintainer is responsible towards his users to fix bugs. There is quite a
similar phrase for it in the debian social contract.
Exaggerated: the developper is forced to fix bugs but doesn't get
anything in return (as oposed to the commercial world, where you get "at
least" paid)
I would very much like to see this emphasis move a bit further to what I
stated at the top: "scratching one own's itch".
That would mean that reporting a bug would be very highly estimated, but
the idea would be: "if there's a problem you [the user] find, then
fix it yourself". Under such a perspective the maintainer could
content himself with maintainership and not be "obliged" to debuging and
development (of course it's anyway up to the maintainer to do what he
consider to be right).
This perspective does have practical implications. There are plenty of
packages that do have a pro-forma maintainer, which aparently uploaded the
package in question to scratch his personal itch (he needed a certain
functionality that was missing in Debian) but who does not have the
required ressources afterwards to resolve major issues with it once it is
in. One can not assume that there's missing maintainer goodwill to
fix packages in the first place and so I'd not expect that there would be
significantly more activity under a stronger "responsibility" perspective.
So IMHO no one would really gain anything from that. That's in contrast to
the "..own itch" perspective where the dogma of the "user" would be dissolved
into a co-responsibility: you use it, so fix it and I'll make sure the
fix gets distributed.
OK, that's only my cent of wisdom,
*t
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tomas Pospisek
SourcePole - Linux & Open Source Solutions
http://sourcepole.ch
Elestastrasse 18, 7310 Bad Ragaz, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (81) 330 77 11
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: