Maintainer Responsibilities

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On 06/04/2009 02:01 AM, Tim Waugh wrote:
> My own opinion is that the package maintainer is responsible for
> reporting bugs upstream when they are able to reproduce them.
> 
> One reason for my belief is that I've seen the situation from the other
> side: as an upstream maintainer for a package, getting bug reports
> directly from users of a packaged version in another operating system.
> 
> It can be a frustrating experience because the person reporting the bug
> can never be quite sure which version they are using (due to additional
> patches used in packaging), and generally are not able to try out
> suggested patches or pull from a source code repository.
> 
> My point is that it isn't only the people reporting bugs that get
> frustrated by "go report it upstream", it is also the larger free
> software community.

+1

For an upstream taking in bugs, a package maintainer reporting bugs is
usually a much better resource than a random user.  Random users
disappear.  They switch software to escape bugs.  They switch distros.
They report a bug that they encounter once but don't have the
persistence to write down the exact steps that they used to create it.
Good package maintainers do.  It's much easier to collaboratively fix
issues with a package maintainer because the package maintainer has
invested time in getting the package into their distribution and wants
the software to be bug-free as much as upstream.  The end user is more
fickle.

-Toshio

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