On Thu, Sep 06, 2018 at 09:05:04PM +0200, Moritz Muehlenhoff wrote:
> Source: developers-reference
> Severity: normal
>
> "3.1.4. Coordination with upstream developers" says
>
> "You have to forward these bug reports to the upstream developers so that they
> can be fixed in a future upstream release."
>
> That's not the current/best practice for a number of packages, either because
> of the sheer volume of bug reports/size of the package or because some of the
> bugs are very specific to the reporters setup and having the Debian maintainer
> as a middle person forwarding information back and forth would be useless
> (e.g. for the Linux kernel where a lot of bug reports are hardware-specific).
>
> The current formulation will cause false expections for end users.
>
> Maybe alternatively make this
>
> "You can either forward these bug reports to the upstream developers yourself
> or ask the reporter to report them upstream, so that they can be fixed in a
> future upstream release."
I would like something stronger.
To me, the core message of the current text is that you should ensure
that bug reports which are not Debian-specific end up with upstream,
*somehow*, whether by the maintainers forwarding it to upstream
themselves or by them asking the reporter to do so. Your proposed new
text weakens that, and I think that's not a good idea.
I agree that it's perfectly fine for a maintainer to say "this is an
upstream bug, please report it upstream", which the current text doesn't
allow for. Having said that, I *don't* think it's fine for a maintainer
to say "never ever report upstream bugs for this package to Debian"; for
someone not familiar with the software in question, determining whether
something is a Debian-specific bug or an upstream one is not always
possible.
While we're at it, I think we should also point out that if upstream
uses an issue tracker that is supported by bts-link, it might be nice to
keep upstream bug reports that were filed in the Debian bts open, but
mark them as forwarded to the correct URL so that bts-link will tag them
"fixed-upstream" when relevant. That should probably not be a
requirement though.
--
Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!?
-- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008
Hacklab
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature