When to get the upstream maintainer involved.

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

Is there policy manual material on when to get the upstream maintainer
involved in a problem? If not, we need to insert some.

In general, you should _not_ bother the upstream maintainer until you
have determined that there is a bug in their program. Specificaly:

* Debian handles it own user support. We do not pass user correspondence
  on to the upstream maintainer before we know what is wrong.

* We diagnose programs by ourselves. We do not ask the upstream maintainer
  to do the work of the package maintainer.

* Before we pass on a bug, we make darned sure it's not our problem.
  This is especially important in the case of porting packages to libc 6,
  where the package may not be at fault, and libc 6 or the way we are
  building the package is where the problem lies.

If you find that you don't understand a package well enough to diagnose
it, it's probably a good idea for you to swap that package for another,
with a maintainer who can handle it better.

	Thanks

	Bruce
-- 
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Bruce Perens K6BP   bruce@debian.org   NEW PHONE NUMBER: 510-620-3502