Upstream maintainers are sleeping (Was: Reviving Debian QA
On Monday 29 March 1999, at 1 h 17, the keyboard of Adam Di Carlo
<aph@debian.org> wrote:
> * check that patches that should be sent upstream are being sent
> upstream -- I think this is very important and I think we have a
> bit of a bad reputation on this count.
Could you elaborate? After all, source packages are available for the upstream
developers.
> (d) Perhaps another cron job, implementing a public emailing to
> debian-devel, listing the top 100 packages with huge debian diffs.
This seems a poor metric. One of the packages I maintain (ncbi-tools6-dev) has
a documentation of 300 pages in MS-Word format. I translated it in ASCII and
put in the source package. Does it qualify me as "not sending patches
upstream"?
Also, the upstream maintainers have a bad reputation, too :-) queso in Debian
now has a lot of patches which are silently ignored by the upstream maintainer
(64 bits support, for instance). We are actually forking. The maintainer of
phylip, when I sent him the patches for glibc support, replied that he already
had them in his private area for a long time but did not bother to make a new
release :-( This sort of behaviour does not push me to send patches upstream
anymore.
> Start pushing harder for maintainers to try to work out fixes with
> the upstream maintainers -- this is a cultural issue. (Maybe even a
> lintian warning if the debian diff has lots of patches not under the
> debian subdir?)
So, when an upstream maintainer no longer replies, I will be castigated?
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