Maintainer Responsibilities

[Jaroslav Reznik]

On Jueves 04 Junio 2009 11:01:56 Tim Waugh escribió:
> 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.

As I said - I don't want to left user in upstream jungle :-) It's more like 
moving bug closer to developer - user which report it is in contact with 
developer (that real upstream developer) and we can provide for upstream more 
details from Fedora side + prepare package for user to test it etc. Simple - 
collaboration - open source :-) Aim is fix the bug - then user is happy, we 
are happy and upstream is happy!

> 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.
>
> Another reason for maintainers to give bug reports due diligence is that
> it is hard to report bugs.  Package maintainers may not always
> appreciate this, since they do it all the time, but look at bugzilla as
> though you've never seen it before (or just remember back to when you
> first saw it) -- it is hard to fill out a huge form, and if the problem
> is not severe enough to warrant your time on it (or you aren't even sure
> if it's a bug) you may just not bother.

But this is another problem - BZ is really big monster (every time I'm 
reporting bug I'm scared :D). I have small PyGtk RHBZ reporter, maybe I'll 
release it some day (there are hardcoded passwords etc...).

> Bug reporters are absolutely essential to healthy free software and
> should be treated with respect.  They are our eyes.
>
> Roll on ABRT.

And new Dr. Konqui with nice guide to report crash - directly upstream. I 
talked with ABRT developers about closer collaboration, we'll see.

Jaroslav

>
> Tim.
> */

-- 
Jaroslav Řezník <jreznik at redhat.com>
Associate Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

Office: +420 532 294 275
Mobile: +420 731 455 332
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