Re: Bug#215647: [patch] xterm 4.3.0-0pre1v3 i18n
On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 10:52:47AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
[...]
> The bug submitter had already contacted the upstream maintainer of
> XTerm, and the patches had been rejected by him. Apparently, the
> submitter's goal was to get Debian to fork from upstream after the exact
> same change had been rejected upstream.
If I follow you, Debian libtool must not be patched too.
> I think KUBOTA-san's effort to sneak his changes in through the
> backdoor, as it were, without apprising me of his earlier failed efforts
> to get them accepted upstream, was an underhanded and dishonest thing to
> do.
It is sometimes easier to patch Debian packages because we know that
some tools are available. For instance in #179929 the same upstream
rejected a patch because GNU sed is needed, and you did not apply
it too. Do you have any good reason?
And the fix is trivial, sed -e 's/[.@].*//' should do the trick without
GNU sed.
> When the Debian-JP Project merged with Debian, the understanding was the
> Debian-JP maintainers would work with upstream authors and their fellow
> non-JP Debian developers in an open and communicative fashion, instead
> of just forking everything behind a wall of silence.
>
> In the instant case, I feel that pledge has been violated.
>
> It's happened again, just within the past day, with "xft-cjk"; while the
> person who inadvertently uploaded it to auric's queue wasn't a Debian
> Developer (the upload was rejected), there is probably at least one
> Debian developer who is aware of these patches. Has there ever been a
> bug filed against xft about the issues which that patch seeks to
> address? No.
Are you kidding? On the one hand patches are rejected without even
telling why, and on the other hand forks are considered as unfriendly.
> Our Social Contract says "We Won't Hide Problems".
Given the amount of trivial bugreports related to i18n with patches
against xterm/xlibs, your interpretation seems to be "We Will Expose
Problems via the BTS".
> I do not feel that that principle is being upheld very well by some
> of our developers.
>
> That KUBTOA-san has a patch for xterm that was rejected by upstream was
> a problem. He didn't tell me of his patch's past history with the
> upstream maintainer. He hid it instead.
After reading other i18n related bugreports, I have the feeling that
you won't apply a patch not approved by upstream, even if it is a
trivial fix for a real problem. So I would have behaved the exact same
way as Kubota-san did.
Denis
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