Maintainer Responsibilities

[Kevin Kofler]

Steve Grubb wrote:
> For the record, I agree with this sentiment. If there's a bug in my
> packages, I want to fix it and not cause the reporter to have to get
> upstream bz accounts or join upstream mail lists just because they
> reported a problem. I will interact with the reporter until I see the
> problem myself. And then I can fix it or show upstream the problem.

Maybe you package only stuff you're intimately familiar with from top to
bottom and you get only very few bug reports. But in KDE, we get dozens of
bug reports and it's a huge codebase. While most of the bugs are probably
such that I could fix any of them on its own, there's no way I can fix all
of them by myself (and even considering all the KDE SIG folks, we still
don't have enough time to fix everything ourselves), nor would my fix
necessarily be good enough to be accepted upstream (sometimes a good fix
needs significant code changes which only the upstream maintainer of the
affected code base is really qualified to do, and that's usually not a
Fedora developer). So I think you're getting a better deal by us insisting
on having the bugs handled upstream. I guess other codebases where bugs are
expected to be filed upstream (e.g. Evolution, which was also brought up in
this thread) are similar.

        Kevin Kofler