Maintainer Responsibilities

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 16:17 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
> 
> 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? 

There are _some_ kinds of bug (feature requests, etc.) which it's
reasonable for any decent maintainer to punt upstream.

There are other kinds of bugs (crashes, security issues -- perhaps even
_anything_ that's a real bug rather than an RFE) which the maintainer
really _ought_ to deal with directly.

Opinions vary on precisely where the boundary between those classes
should be, but I'm fairly adamant it should be 'RFE vs. bug'.

Any packager who _isn't_ capable of handling the latter class of bug
probably shouldn't be maintaining the package without the assistance of
a co-packager or their sponsor. Note that you don't _have_ to be able to
code to handle a real bug in an acceptable fashion -- decent
coordination with upstream can be perfectly sufficient, if upstream are
responsive enough. But just closing the bug in our bugzilla as
'upstream' is rarely acceptable for a _real_ bug, IMHO.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation