Debian social contract - who reports bugs upstream?
I read this at http://www.debian.org/social_contract :
2 We will give back to the free software community
When we write new components of the Debian system, we will license them
in a manner consistent with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We will
make the best system we can, so that free works will be widely
distributed and used. We will communicate things such as bug fixes,
improvements and user requests to the "upstream" authors of works
included in our system.
It appears that there have been problems with gnu-fdisk that weren't
passed upstream to the mailing list bug-fdisk@gnu.org - archived at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fdisk/ including Debian bug 464720
which was only passed upstream by myself (and promptly fixed by the
author). There were very few Debian bugs reported against gnu-fdisk and
464720 was already several months old when I added to the initial report.
I've cc:'d nnnnnn@bugs.debian.org when an upstream author posts a fix to
a Debian bug report that I've submitted, but wondered why the Debian
package maintainers hadn't submitted the bug report upstream.
Some packages (e.g. ALSA-related) suggest directly contacting upstream
if the problem isn't Debian packaging, but other packages seem to have
the implicit understanding that the package maintainer(s) will report
Debian user bug reports upstream if the problem is not purely a Debian
packaging issue.
Are there any ways to improve the reporting of bugs upstream without
over-burdening either the Debian package maintainers or the Debian end
users?
Arthur.
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