Re: A suggestion for the woody freeze
Le Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 09:27:58AM -0600, Vince Mulhollon écrivait:
> I disagree. There are already too many psycho maintainers whom post rants
> to -devel, that generally contain vague threats of punishment if you dare
> to NMU one of their buggy packages. With current policies, etc, more NMUs
> will cause more annoying rants, hurt feelings, generally the negative stuff
> will outweigh the positive stuff.
Sorry I don't agree with this. What you express is a general feeling
that comes from the very few people who actually shout loud when one of
their packages is NMUed without following the conventions. However most
of the NMUs are accepted without a grumbling.
If you are following the rules, you rarely get bashed ... even if you
don't follow them, you get good results as long as you don't ignore the
maintainer : you are working *with him* and not against him.
Last but not least, if your NMU is good and well done, you don't have
a single reason to fear the maintainer. If he flames you, you just
bring up the issue on debian-devel (without flames) explaining
all the good reasons for your NMU (bug very old, patches available,
no activity since <monthes ago>, packages has dozens of simples bugs,
...). Well not all issues should be brought up to debian-devel but
from time to time it doesn't hurt, the maintainer may at least
notice that he does a bad job and as such he shouldn't flame anyone
doing an NMU.
> Because of those events, I will not do NMUs, not to anyones packages, not
You just took a bad decision.
> What I think we need, is a policy change that dramatically loosens the
> rules about NMUs, to encourage more of them.
The only thing that needs to be loosened is the period of time to wait
before uploading an NMU (and that's already commonly done). What NMU
rules are too strict in your opinion ?
> Is it really "free software" if one developer arbitrarily prevents another
> developer from applying a simple patch? I think not.
Certainly it is. Do you think Linus accepts any "simple patch" he gets ?
[ There's no need to respond to my question ]
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://strasbourg.linuxfr.org/~raphael/
Formation Linux et logiciel libre : http://www.logidee.com
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