Re: dicussion about patches ... ignoring patches make motivation to provide them fall
Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> On Sun, Mar 19, 2006 at 12:44:05PM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>> I believe you are wrong. If you are right, then I am a very impolite
>> maintainer, as I have too many packages with too many bugs to look
>> after, so I do not manage to look at, nor acknowledge and comment on,
>> all the reported bugs against them, nor evaluate or commit the patches
>> provided. But I try my best, and fail to see why your assumption that
>> my behavior is impolite can in any way be correct.
> Ok, possible. my opinion on this may be colored by getting explained
> during an hour why the patch should not be applied :)
> Still, this is a real problem, as it affects the quality of debian,
> which is why i think that team-maintainership or backup maintainers is
> the real issue.
The *real* issue is that more people need to go through the bug reports on
major packages, apply patches, fix bugs, and reduce the list. Everything
else is just at best discussion over method, and while we're talking about
method, we're not really doing work.
Whenever this topic comes up on debian-devel, the conversation seems to
focus on the small minority of maintainers who don't respond to bugs, are
still active on their packages, resist any attempt at co-maintainership,
and can't be dealt with through the MIA process. Such people, to the
extent that they exist, are frustrating; they're also such a small
minority of the problem that if they were all we had to worry about,
Debian would be in awesome shape.
Debian is *full* of packages with huge bug lists and maintainers who are
actively asking for co-maintainers and actively soliciting help. One good
day of helping out with one of those packages is worth all of the endless
discussions about procedure that we've had so far this year.
If you really don't know how to find one of those packages, can I suggest
cvs (RFH filed by maintainer, 137 bugs, 6 patches in the BTS, over 6,000
popcon installations)? Or grub (RFH filed by maintainer specifically
asking for BTS help, 132 bugs, 12 patches in the BTS, over 7,500 popcon
installations)?
If you think this is a huge problem with Debian, then for heaven's sake go
work on it! If you run into a maintainer who doesn't want your help, move
on and try another maintainer. It's not like we've already taken care of
all of the low-hanging fruit.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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