Re: Filing bugs with upstream
On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 08:47:45AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> In my opinion, best practice is to file a Debian bug, and rely on the
> Debian maintainer to file an upstream bug. If you do file an upstream
> bug, you should verify yourself that the bug exists in the unmodified
> upstream sources, not just in the Debian package. (And here I do mean
> "verify", not just "reason about it and think it must".)
Speaking as both an "upsream" AND a debian maintainer, I would like to
advocate the position of filing it primairly upstream, if "upstream"
happens to have a decent bug filing mechanism.
Even if they dont, I would still advocate giving some kind of notice
upstream *first*.
>From purely a "time-to-fix" standpoint, it is better for the open source
community in general, to directly notify the upstream maintainer, so that
they can start working on an actual fix sooner.
A comparison of outcomes for your analysis.
Only the cases in doubt are compared. no point with "Y,Y" cases.
Good Upstream, Good Deb Maintainer
File with Deb File Upstream
Y N
Outcome: Deb files with upstream, upstream fixes, new package comes
File with Deb File Upstream
N Y
Outcome: upstream fixes, new package comes
Good Upstream, Bad Deb Maintainer
File with Deb File Upstream
Y N
Outcome: Deb does not file with upstream, nothing gets fixed
File with Deb File Upstream
N Y
Outcome: upstream fixes, new package may or may not come,
but at least someone could NMU?
Bad Upstream, Good Deb Maintainer
File with Deb File Upstream
Y N
Outcome: Deb files with upstream, nothing gets fixed
File with Deb File Upstream
N Y
Outcome: Nothing gets fixed
[okay, in this last set, if you have "Superb Deb Maintainer", they
might write a source patch :-) but that is a very very exceptional case
I think]
I think the above case analysis shows a slight favour to
give preference to file with upstream, if there is an implication that
people are often too lazy to duplicate bug reports to two places properly.
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