bug #149713

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 19:13:40 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:

> If Extras packagers (for Core it's IMHO different since that's being
> done by paid professionals) are required to be able to fix bugs in the
> software they package I think it should be clearly communicated
> somewhere instead of being left up to people's own definitions of what
> consists of package maintainership.

You are not "required" to do that. You are not required to spend an awful
lot of time in a debugger, hunting down bugs and trying to fix what the
upstream developers could have avoided or what they should fix with the
next update.  You are a volunteer. Do what you like to do and what you can
do. Maybe you feel better if your package contains an additional fix which
makes sense and which makes run-time misbehaviour less likely.
 
> Then again I've seen more than a few cases of "please file to upstream
> (bugzilla)" comments from RH package maintainers in bug reports.

Yeah, and it sucks. Especially if it's a customer of some sort, who
reports the bug. Some people bought Red Hat Linux boxes, some only
downloaded it for free. Those who bought the boxes and found a bug, found
the bug to be in Red Hat's product, a product they paid for. They don't
care whether Red Hat packaged the software made by some other vendor. The
inform Red Hat that Red Hat's product has a flaw, and they assume that Red
Hat has interest in fixing the product or the next version of it. Now if
the customer or user is told to report it somewhere else, it is assumed
that his interest in big enough to go through the efforts of travelling
upstream to report a bug there (bugzilla account creation, and and and).
Some do, some don't. Maybe the next customer runs into the same old bug in
the next release of the product and is disappointed. Maybe two hundred
other customers are satisfied because instead of fixing a series of
compiler warnings, developer time was spent on fixing/improving something
more important instead.

> Where
> do you draw the line? My line has always been "if it's caused by my
> changes it's obviously my responsibility to fix, otherwise complain
> upstream." If that's not considered enough I think I'm out here apart
> from the couple of projects where I actually contribute upstream.

Again, if the original reporter is too lazy to report it upstream, maybe
the bug hits back some day. Maybe some other member of the Fedora
community has more interest in the same software and likes to help make it
better.  Bugzilla is open for everyone. Community contributors can define
queries, e.g. with which to list ticket activity of the last two weeks and
then join and help where they have interest.

Team work would be ideal for maintaining packages in Fedora Extras.

-- 
Fedora Core release 3 (Heidelberg) - Linux 2.6.10-1.766_FC3
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