On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 07:57:44AM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> On Di, 22 Mai 2012, Hilmar Preuße wrote:
>> You love to open bugs for Debian stable, right? Please note that we
>> don't deal with bug severity < RC in Debian stable, i.e. if that
>> problem would have been solved in Debian sid we'd have closed that
>> bug immediately.
> And, in addition, did you read the reportbug message:
> *We*are*not*a*TeX*Help*Desk*
> Bugs should be concerning the packaging, not concerning bugs within
> packages (like interoperabillity etc).
Yes, I did. The reportbug message I got (with texlive version 2009-11)
was very exactly:
------------ begin quote ----------------
If you report an error when running one of the TeX-related binaries
(latex, pdftex, metafont,...), or if the bug is related to bad or wrong
output, please include a MINIMAL example input file that produces the
error in your report.
Please run your example with
(pdf)latex -recorder ...
(or any other program that supports -recorder) and send us the generated
file with the extension .fls, it lists all the files loaded during
the run and can easily explain problems induced by outdated files in
your home directory.
Don't forget to also include minimal examples of other files that are
needed, e.g. bibtex databases. Often it also helps
to include the logfile. Please, never send included pictures!
If your example file isn't short or produces more than one page of
output (except when multiple pages are needed to show the problem),
you can probably minimize it further. Instructions on how to do that
can be found at
http://www.latex-einfuehrung.de/mini-en.html (english)
or
http://www.latex-einfuehrung.de/mini.html (german)
--------------------------- end quote ---------------------------
I see that in a *later* version this text was added, but _it was not
in the message I got_:
--------------------------- begin quote ---------------------------
IMPORTANT INFORMATION: We will only consider bug reports concerning
the packaging of TeX Live as relevant. If you have problems with
combination of packages in a LaTeX document, please consult your
local TeX User Group, the comp.text.tex user group, the author of
the original .sty file, or any other help resource.
In particular, bugs that are related to up-upstream, i.e., neither
Debian nor TeX Live (upstream), but the original package authors,
will be closed immediately.
*** The Debian TeX Team is *not* a LaTeX Help Desk ***
--------------------------- end quote ---------------------------
I understand that either your policy changed, or you documented it
more clearly, between these two points in time. But I _did_ read the
reportbug message in its entirety!
When I entered Debian, it was very much the general policy that users
should report the bug to the Debian BTS, and the maintainer would
separate upstream issues from Debian-specific issues and interact with
upstream, the user not being expected to by able to do that; on the
contrary we kinda protected upstream from users (which were not in a
very good position to know if the problem was upstream or
Debian-specific). It has become popular for maintainers of "big"
packages to have another policy, that they won't do that and ask users
to speak to upstream directly. I respect that (and I understand the
"lack of resources" reasons), but when that policy is not clearly
documented (as it was in the version of the TeX Live packages I had at
that time) and I'm not knowledgeable enough about the program to make
a good bug report upstream, yes, I do fall back on what I understand
to be the default policy. In the specific case of (La)TeX I (at the
time) found it sometimes highly not obvious how to find the upstream
of this or that LaTeX package... If I remember well, maintainership
changed hands by announcement on some Usenet newsgroup, so you kinda
had to search the archives, ... Maybe hypertex was more clearly
maintained, but I must admit that I felt quite overwhelmed by all this
(La)TeX galaxy, and that in 2012 I was emptying the "found during my
thesis writing" pipeline and was not as available as before to launch
into investigations.
Also, IMHO it is to be expected to have bug reports about the version
in stable, since that's what users not interested in the risk of "how
broken is my system today" supposedly run... If the user gets as an
answer "bug fixed in unstable", that's rather good news! But IMHO
expecting every single user to balance several different VMs or jails
or ... is not that user-friendly. While I sympathise with the lack of
manpower, in the abstract I wish Debian would be more user-friendly in
that way. No, I don't have a solution to give package maintainers the
resources to fulfil my wish.
Thank you very much Hilmar that you exceptionally took the time to
handle my bug report anyway.
--
Lionel
