Re: dicussion about patches ... ignoring patches make motivation to provide them fall
Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
Yes, these are the most frustrating cases.
> 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.
> [...]
> If you run into a maintainer who doesn't want your help, move on and try
> another maintainer.
It might not be so simple. Suppose I have taken it upon myself to push
change Foo through Debian. The Foo project requires cooperation from
several DDs and at the beginning I can't tell whether I will get that
cooperation from all of them. After having devoted many hours to project
Foo and after the passage of some months I find that progress is blocked
by needed changes to package P. I write to the maintainer of P but get no
reply. After repeating this a few times I (finally!) get a message from
the P maintainer... about his having more important things to do than deal
with my patch. Time goes by and the patch is never spoken of again. Of
course I move on and do something else. But I have wasted a lot of time,
Foo never gets done, and I have learned not to undertake any more projects
like Foo in the future. Not within Debian, anyway.
Purely hypothetical case, but it could happen.
--
Thomas Hood
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