Re: Make Debian better (Re: Two Debian 3.0 reviews at Slashdot)
On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 11:27:34PM -0400, Mark L. Kahnt wrote:
> My understanding is that the original intention of the Debian BTS was to
> be about packaging bugs - it has evolved beyond that partly as it is
> handy to report any bugs, and for users that don't recognise the
> difference between distributions and developers of specific software
> (which *does* on occasion happen amongst Debian users,) it can be the
> only address available to pass on problems, whether actually appropriate
> or not.
I think the original intent was to be about all bugs, actually. If you
look back in the archives, some of the earliest bugs we still have
records of are really nasty upstream problems, and many of those came
from the original author of the BTS. As far as I can tell, it was always
intended that we should help the free software community by acting as a
middle-man for bug reports in the software we distribute.
The exact mechanism doesn't really matter: it's OK if a maintainer says
"yes, this is an upstream problem, but they prefer to talk to users
directly, so I recommend that you report it upstream yourself using this
address", as long as the maintainer is willing to help follow through.
What's not acceptable, IMHO at least, is for bugs to be *dismissed* in
that way. Fortunately it's only a small minority of developers who do
the latter.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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