Re: On maintainers not responding to bugs
This is from the perspective of a non-DD systems administrator. While most
maintainers are good. Some are pretty lousy with regard to addressing issue
even when one is proactive about finding a solution.
On Monday 26 February 2007 14:55, Don Armstrong wrote:
> I don't believe any maintainer of
> packages, given enough hours in the day, would fail to respond to
> reasonable bug reports.
I don't agree with this statement. I have dealt with some maintainers that
refuse to acknowledge a bug when I report it. At the worst, the maintainer
makes some wild assumption and code dumps a new revision of their package.
That action causes me to have to totally work around their packages to make
things work.
The aoetools package is a fine example of this phenomenon. I have to
completely override what that package does with it's init script to get my
aoe devices working. [1] is a good example of a maintainer refusing to
acknowledge any level of my trying to help find a solution for a bug.
Paraphrased, the maintainers response was it won't work, with no interest in
my use case (that of using block storage hosted on a network like aoe or
iscsi), even when I tried to produce some fixed that worked for me. I have
had to write initramfs-tools scripts and shutdown scripts to work around the
package. These scripts live at [2].
I am interested in getting a more robust framework for this type of storage
integrated into Debian so that AOE and ISCSI storage can be used more
effectively, but when I bring it up, I just get a the-maintainer-is-right
slap down, and the maintainer has no interest. I even provided some prototype
scripts to get my use case working. The aoetools are in such bad shape that
they can't even be used with the ocfs2tools (same maintainer) without a lot
of manual work.
As another data point, [3] could be fixed with my initramfs-tools scripts. I
am sure that the scripts are not generic enough to go in unchanged, but a
little respect from the maintainer, and maybe some help getting this use case
working would be appreciated.
Also, that same maintainer has been downright insulting, which doesn't make me
want to help out at all.
[1]http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=387552
[2]http://penguintechs.org/~wt/debian/aoe_stuff/aoe-block.tar
[3]http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=408044
wt
--
Warren Turkal
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