Re: Hypocrisy of Debian (was: Sorry, no more RC bugs for non-free data in main ...)
* Roberto Gordo Saez (roberto.gordo@gmail.com) [060909 11:22]:
> But there is something I do not understand. Why "this list" is not the
> place to put disagreements on the way legal issues are handled?
There is nothing wrong with discussing legal issues in debian-legal, try
to get a common understanding, try to resolve issues etc.
However, it isn't guranteed that someone picks up things posted in
debian-legal. Debian-legal is a discussion place, not an issue tracker.
> My claims are for the bugs that are downgraded, silently ignored or
> allowed into the stable release because of several exceptions that I
> do not see. And that is what I would want to say.
If you think the Debian-project at large is misinterpreting the social
contract, I think the right place for this discussion is debian-project.
If you think a maintainer does severity deflation of serious bugs, and
you cannot get to a common understanding, you should IMHO consider
speaking with the maintainer first. The debian-legal list could
sometimes be of some assistance, as well as other lists (also of course
depending on the kind of bug report), but the final say about whether a
bug is release critical or not is in the hands of the release team (and
if you don't like their decision, the appropriate way to escalate per
constitution is the technical committee). Of course, trying to get the
heat level down, and also having a good and helpful reputation are both
quite helpful in achiving a good result - our goal should be that bugs
are fixed.
So often writing a patch for a package is more important than arguing about
the severity. I have more than once experienced that maintainers accept
patches for bugs they consider of relatively low priority, if one gives
them an well-tested patch and explains why it is more important for
other users - even if the maintainer doesn't agree it is any real bug at
all, he might be willing to fix it. And that is what really counts in
the end of the day.
> That is exactly I was trying to perform, searching for license
> problems, reporting them, and also trying to help to solve them
> whenever possible. I think that we all agree with this. The problem
> starts when we disagree on how much important a particular issue is,
> and a serious problem for myself is not serious for others.
My experience is that one should start with "easy" issues - because it
is far easier to convince people in such cases. Just as an idea, you
could e.g. use user tags for such bugs. And then you can follow on such
bugs even if the maintainer disagree about priorities. You could even
set up some page with sorting by priorities or so and make update mails.
But don't expect anyone else to jump up on that.
> Every person has a different point of view, this is perfectly normal.
> But I think we have an important difference between Debian claims and
> reality, and I would prefer to have less beautiful claims more close
> to reality than ideal claims too far from reality.
Actually, Debian makes different claims. And as always in real life,
different claims sometimes conflict with each other. That is natural,
and we need to make sure we somehow get to the best we could under
condition of all these claims.
That different people have different priorities is something helpful,
and the only thing we need to make sure is that we don't hurt ourselfs
in the discussion. None of the goals is a 120%-goal - and to learn that
is something not too easy. So I welcome any efforts, as long as we all
keep our common goals as common goals, and try to work together towards
them.
Cheers,
Andi
--
http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/
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