Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, 2008-03-14 at 19:57 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:

>  On the contrary, I don't think anyone really
> considers an upstream tarball, which is stripped off of mp3 codecs at the
> source-level 

That one was fixed the way it should have been originally - upstream has
accommodated us with a source level split (-good, -bad, -ugly).  

>  If choosing a readable package name is considered as
> disrespectful, stripping and patching source tarballs is, too.

If you do it without at least trying to work with upstream on it, it
definitely is.

Anyways, I just spoke up because recently I discovered Debian was
patching some of my software - the patch was useful, but did I ever get
a bug filed in the issue tracker or a post to the discussion group?
Nope.  Now I've been guilty of this myself before in the past, and in
fact I maintained the GStreamer package years ago, and didn't do
anything to try to work with upstream on the mp3 issue.   Now I think
people do talk too blithely about patching or modifying upstream as just
part of "packaging"; there is a lot of responsibility to be taken with
the power to patch.