Maintainer Responsibilities

[Michal Hlavinka]

> Hello,
>
> I don't want to start a long thread, but just to ask a couple questions for
> my own clarification. Does a maintainer's responsibilities end with
> packaging bugs? IOW, if there is a problem in the package that is _broken
> code_ do they need to do something about it or is it acceptable for them to
> close the bug and say talk to upstream? Do we want those bugs open to track
> when the bug is fixed in the distro? I'll accept whatever the answer is,
> I'm just curious.

I think it depends on what type of users we want. If we want only skilled 
users (programmers) we can close most bugs upstream. But this is not a good 
way if we want also less skilled users (and bug reports from them). There are 
tons of packages in fedora, most of them have own upstream. For every package 
you need usually some kind of bugzilla registration (or mailing list 
subscription), which is (at least) a little bit odd - expecting users are 
willing to have so many subscriptions/registrations. The second problem are 
less skilled users. What if upstream answers: ok, thanks for bug report, 
please try this patch... or I've fixed it in repo, please try svn snapshot,  if 
it's fixed for you?

We can't expect all users are skilled for this.

Michal