Quoting Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org): > That said, the process of forwarding bugs along is sort of annoying in > many cases and may not be a very appealing place for volunteers to spend > their time, so I think it tends to be one of the first things that stops > happening when maintainer teams are overloaded. Definitely. That happens even more quickly for packages or software where reproducting bugs is not easy when you're not the one who reported them initially. That has been my experience with samba, where most bugs are related to some specific setups which are not easy to reproduce in a developer environment. Acting as a proxy between bug submitters and upstream developers isn't very efficient most of the time. Still, my feeling about this is that this is *at first* the maintainer's responsibility and at least it is his|her responsibility to help the bug submitter in reporting upstream properly, and properly deal with upstream. But, of course, for complicated *and* popular *and* understaffed packages.....that can very quickly become a really tedious task....and often the one that gets dropped if the maintenance team is overloaded. Still, we should avoid to leave bug submitter with "please report upstream, thanks" (and, well, I did that anyway from time to time, myself: we're all far from perfect).
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