Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community?
On Fri, Sep 16, 2022 at 08:47:19AM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
> On 9/16/22 12:12 AM, Nilesh Patra wrote:
>>
> > On Thu, Sep 15, 2022 at 06:17:02PM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
> bugs are important. I am not a DD so my bugs are not as important to the
> maintainers who have a greater responsibility to respond to a DD's bug than
> to an unknown user's bug. That is the way it should be. No problem here, and
> please no one reply and say I am complaining. I am not. I am just seeing
> how things work at Debian and I think they work fairly well.
>
Hi Chuck,
*Just because you're a DD* is not a priority call for bugs. At least one
of the bugs you reference is for Xen and seems to have bounced between
Debian and kernel devs. and still, perhaps, not to be fixed, for example.
Xen is a much lower priority than it used to be when it was the first
hypervisor in common use. There are fewer maintainers _anywhere_ with
deep knowledge of Xen. If the bug with Xen keyboard doesnt' get fixed
quickly in Debian, it may be bacause there isn't a maintainer / there
are other higher priority bugs / it genuinely should be fixed upstream.
If you know a fix - you can talk to the Xen maintainer in Debian, you could
submit a patch, you could ask them if they want to work with you to see
it fixed. If they say it's a wishlist bug / they have higher priorities on
their tiem - you can still help.
You can politely ask the Linux kernel maintainers similarly. You can ask the
Linux Foundation at xenproject.org if the bug is still there in their version.
It's a "do-ocracy" that may rely on you to chase.
I reiterate my suggestion to you to go and read list archives / documentation
/ the Codes of Conduct to get a better picture of who you are asking, what
you are asking for and generally "How Debian works". Long messages to
debian-user and debian-project may not help here as an initial approach.
Russ and Wouter and others have made suggestions as to how to approach
people in a better way so that they will listen to you and read what
you have to say more readily.
With every good wish,
Andy Cater
> >
> > In that case, it is nice to file good bug reports (as Andy told you) and if you have a
> > patch, that's even better. You could consider to ping maintainers after a week or so if
> > you think it is important.
>
> Thanks for the advice. I think a week is way to short. They probably would
> think I am a nag and a troll if I did that. I usually wait six months and they
> still ignore the bug sometimes.
>
> > And if you think something very critical is broken, you could
> > even raise the severity of the bug, I don't see a lot of problem with it.
> >
> > And yes, sometimes the maintainers of a package _can_ be AFK too,
>
> For six months?
>
> > this is volunteer work
> > after all. Someone might be on a vacation, or in a conference, or travelling, or busy with RL
> > and seeing your BR on an immediate basis isn't a possibility.
> >
> > > Also, in my experience, these bugs and catastrophic failures caused by updates
> > > of a supposedly stable release happened *much* less often when I used software
> > > that is written by paid developers.
> >
> > Fine, but what do you propose to do here? Pay all DDs for fixing bugs? Who will manage the finances/funding?
> > What if a bug report is critical and someone is unwilling to pay for a fix? What if someone needs a break for
> > whatever reason? -- have you considered to give a thought about these?
>
> You misunderstand me a bit here. If I wanted to propose the idea of
> paying Debian volunteers formally, I would have not have done it
> on debian-user. The comments so far make realize that is not how
> Debian people want to handle the problem of maintainer burn-out,
> which seems to be the complaint of some maintainers.
>
> >
> > Also, I'd like to say that calling out Debian contributors with "Hey, you are doing a horrible job" is
> > a negative thing for us to hear as well. You said that you got a few negative replies, which you are annoyed
> > with, this goes both ways, really.
> >
>
> You failed to notice the messages when I thanked the maintainers
> when they fixed the bug. Please judge me on the facts, not just the
> parts you pick out that make me look like a terrible person. IIRC,
> that would be against the Debian Code of Conduct.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Chuck
>
Reply to: