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Re: Trivial bug on apt-file (Was : Re: Development standards for unstable)



On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 02:34:32PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 04:47:33AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote :
> > On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 06:48:38PM +0100, Luk Claes wrote:
> > > > But if you read this bug (#307833), you'd see that the maintainer doesn't
> > > > consider it a bug, and has documented why in the README file.
> > > It is a bug as the package is not usable without curl or wget installed.
> > > Though, I give him a chance to respond to my intention to NMU...
> > An NMU is not the place to "fix" things that the maintainer has
> > specifically said aren't bugs.
> Dear Anthony,
> As stated by the Debian Policy Manual :

I'm not disputing whether it's a bug or not, the maintainer is. If
you are *helping* the maintainer, then fine: do an NMU. 

But if you're specifically trying to do something against their wishes,
do *not*, under any circumstances, NMU. Find a compromise the
maintainer thinks is acceptable, or as a last resort talk to the tech
ctte instead.

To be clear: it's the maintainer that gets to judge whether what you're
doing is helpful or not, not you.

> As complaining to the tech-ctte should not be done becaues I did not
> even try to contact the maintainer directly, I will either:
> - Forget about it, or
> - File a wishlist bug against packages.debian.org, or whatever
>   appropriate, to suggest to stop suggesting the use of a broken
>   package, or at least to mention the bug.

Huh? What's wrong with "- Contact the maintainer" ?

> Sébastien, please fix your bug! Can you imagine Debian if all the
> packages, like yours, would need a manual inspection of the error
> messages to figure out on what it really depends ???

In my experience you almost always get a better response from people if
you assume they've got a good reason for doing what they have been doing,
rather than just trying to add extra punctuation to your sentences.

Admittedly, punctuation is pretty cool...

Cheers,
aj

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