Re: from / to /usr/: a summary
Thank you for the list. That does make things clearer.
"Bernhard R. Link" <brlink@debian.org> writes:
> 1) Debian contributors are volunteers, they are not be forced to do some
> work.
> 2) Packages, especially those not avoidable in a Debian installation,
> are no personal property.
[...]
> 6) (1) means a maintainer can say they will not do something, but they
> cannot say a package will not do it (because of (2)). Also it is
> no argument to silence discussions about what a package should do.
*However*, what is an argument to silence discussion about what a package
would do is if no one is stepping forward to do the work on an *ongoing*
basis, since divergences from upstream are not a one-time thing.
> 7) If the only remaining obstacle in (5) is lack of time for the
> current maintainer to allow derivation from upstream, then a new
> full blown upstream might be one solution. But another solution is
> some comaintainer to volunteer to forward-port those changes and
> handle the incoming Debian bug reports.
Yes. But it needs to actually be a co-maintainer, or it needs to be
someone who's offering to be a new upstream, not someone who is willing to
produce a one-time fix to the problem.
And what my point was about forking upstream is that an easier way to
maintain *significant* changes to upstream without volunteering to do the
rest of the packaging work and integration with Debian is to maintain an
upstream fork and ask the Debian package maintainer to switch upstreams.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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