On Fri, Jun 07, 2019 at 09:03:18PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > This isn't just for us; it's also for the upstreams involved. It can be > demoralizing and frustrating to be pulled into negative discussions about > something you care about, and people have limited capacity to react > gracefully to such things. Part of the goal is to be respectful of that > energy.
Thank you for saying this. I'd go a little further and add that this may very well be true even if the discussion isn't negative! There are very many distributions out there, and a popular upstream project can easily end up being the subject of discussions in quite a number of them at once. If copied on all of them, this can become quite a time-sink. These days it seems that we often find ourselves debating what the point of distributions is anyway. There are many answers to that, but for the purposes of this thread, when done right, one of the positive things distributions add is that we can serve as a kind of fan-out layer, often sorting out bug reports or integration problems without needing to consult the upstream maintainer directly. That means that we can avoid putting extra demands on the upstream maintainer's perhaps scarce time by adding more stuff to their inbox. That's true even in a case like this where it's a concern about upstream's future plans: before Federico replied to this thread, Michael had already cited the upstream bug in which the maintainer had said they were going to maintain a parallel C version. Not everyone is a hyper-efficient email-handling machine, and even if they are maybe it isn't the best possible use of their time; and the antonym of "hide problems" doesn't have to be "make sure that everyone who might be relevant is always copied on emails". Let's be thoughtful about whether we need to take up upstream maintainers' time. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org]