Re: Maintainers, porters, and burden of porting

[Bernd Zeimetz <bernd@bzed.de>]

On 08/29/2011 07:15 PM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> On 29/08/11 at 18:21 +0200, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
>> On 08/29/2011 04:49 PM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>>> I'm also completely tired of investigating issues which are already
>>> known to porters, which is unavoidable if each maintainer is asked
>>> to first do the investigation and then ask porters for help.
>>
>> I'm sure there are issues where even porters can't tell you its a
>> known one without a lot of debugging.  Also there is google which is
>> very helpful in finding problems on weird architectures.
> 
> Only once you have pinpointed a specific problem. In my case, it often
> means going from a broken Ruby script to a minimal test case in Ruby, to
> Ruby's C code, to a minimal test case in C.

IMHO that is exactly what a porter should expect from a maintainer - I
doubt every porter knows Ruby or is willing to learn it - but I'm kinda
sure that most or all porters know C well. We should expect that a
maintainer knows well what he maintains, so creating such a test case
should definitely be the maintainer's work, especially as a lot of
problems are just bugs in the source which show up on some architectures
(like alignment issues).


-- 
 Bernd Zeimetz                            Debian GNU/Linux Developer
 http://bzed.de                                http://www.debian.org
 GPG Fingerprints: ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F