Maintainer Responsibilities

[David Tardon]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 08:59:23AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Steve Grubb wrote:
>>> Not if its closed. How would I be notified that the fix is in Fedora? If
>>> the bug is severe enough, shouldn't the upstream commit be applied to
>>> Fedora's package and the package pushed out for testing? Is all this going
>>> to happen if the bug is closed?
>>
>> You're supposed to be the reporter of or CCed on the upstream bug, then
>> you'll get notified of the fix and can reopen our bug asking for a backport
>> of the fix if it's really that important (but keep in mind that Fedora
>> packages often get upgraded to a bugfix release anyway, for example our KDE
>> gets upgraded to a bugfix release about once a month).
> You are still presuming your users to be interested in developing and  
> working on your package.
>

I think it has been already mentioned in this thread, but I'm going to
mention it again (in, probably void, hope you'll understand it): One of
principles of open source development is a relationship between the
developer and the user. If the relationship be functioning rightly, the
user should be willing _to give_ something back, not just _to take_.

> This simply does not apply - They want to use your package.

If you don't accept that, go on and buy RHEL or SLED or MacOS X or even
MS Windows and you'll get the attendance you expect. Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe product management decides your bug is not important enough or
your request for enhancement wouldn't be wanted by majority of users and
rejects it... As a last instance, you can always hire a free lance
programmer to fix the bugs for you, provided you have the sources and
rights to modify them.

David