Re: xemacs text-mode and gpm mouse issues
*- On 19 Nov, Salman Ahmed wrote about "Re: xemacs text-mode and gpm mouse issues"
>>>>>> "IZ" == Ian Zimmerman <itz@lbin.com> writes:
> IZ> Ian, who was upstream gpm maintainer for a while.
>
> Can someone explain to me what/who upstream and downstream maintainers
> are ? I've never quite figured out upstream/downstream relative to
> who or what!!
>
Upstream are the actual authors of the code. As an example Eric
Raymond is the upstream maintainer of fetchmail. The downstream
or Debian maintainer is the Debian developer who packages it up and
makes sure that it works well with the Debian distribution, in this case
for fetchmail that is Paul Haggart. The downstream maintainer is the
first line of contact for the user. The downstream maintainer evaluates
the bug reports that are sent to the Debian bug tracking system and
tries to find a fix for it. If they can fix it and it is a local Debian
problem then they fix it with the next package release. If they can fix
it and it is an upstream problem then they forward the fix upstream to
the software author for possible inclusion in the main source tree.
Each distribution generally works like this. Thus there are many
downstream maintainers all sending filtered bug reports back to the
upstream maintainer. This saves the upstream author from having to
deal with large numbers of bugs reports that may not be directly
related tot the actual sorce code.
My $.02,
--
Brian Servis
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mechanical Engineering | Never criticize anybody until you
Purdue University | have walked a mile in their shoes,
servis@purdue.edu | because by that time you will be a
http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~servis | mile away and have their shoes.
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