Re: Removing bzip2 support from apt due to rustification
On Fri, Jun 07, 2019 at 09:03:18PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> This isn't just for us; it's also for the upstreams involved. It can be
> demoralizing and frustrating to be pulled into negative discussions about
> something you care about, and people have limited capacity to react
> gracefully to such things. Part of the goal is to be respectful of that
> energy.
Thank you for saying this. I'd go a little further and add that this
may very well be true even if the discussion isn't negative! There are
very many distributions out there, and a popular upstream project can
easily end up being the subject of discussions in quite a number of them
at once. If copied on all of them, this can become quite a time-sink.
These days it seems that we often find ourselves debating what the point
of distributions is anyway. There are many answers to that, but for the
purposes of this thread, when done right, one of the positive things
distributions add is that we can serve as a kind of fan-out layer, often
sorting out bug reports or integration problems without needing to
consult the upstream maintainer directly. That means that we can avoid
putting extra demands on the upstream maintainer's perhaps scarce time
by adding more stuff to their inbox. That's true even in a case like
this where it's a concern about upstream's future plans: before Federico
replied to this thread, Michael had already cited the upstream bug in
which the maintainer had said they were going to maintain a parallel C
version.
Not everyone is a hyper-efficient email-handling machine, and even if
they are maybe it isn't the best possible use of their time; and the
antonym of "hide problems" doesn't have to be "make sure that everyone
who might be relevant is always copied on emails". Let's be thoughtful
about whether we need to take up upstream maintainers' time.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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