Re: Filing bugs with upstream

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 06:23:14PM -0800, Philip Brown wrote:
> 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

This assumes nobody will look after long-outstanding bugs of other
people's packages. That is incorrect, although it will indeed take a bit
longer.

>        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

That assumes the Debian maintainer knows nothing about the internals of
the package and is not capable of fixing upstream bugs himself.

Which is pure bullshit.

>        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]

Absolutely not; IME it is more of the rule rather than the exception.
The cases where this does not happen is usually when upstream is itself
so active in supporting their software that the Debian maintainer is
incapable of fixing it in time him or herself -- but these are not
appliccable to the case at hand.

Have a look at the patch set of XFree86 for an example, who are very
responsive -- but only when it comes to the i386 architecture.

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