Hello, I hope this is the right mailing list. I've been a Debian user for over 10 years, but due to schoolwork and work i haven't been very involved in Debian. Mostly I have submitted patches to upstream or helping upstream debug rather than helping Debian specifically.
For a long time, I always end up with a dozen or so of my own custom packages which I derive from official debian source packages with an extra tiny bugfix patch or two I've thrown in on top and recompiled. Sounds pretty selfish, I know. With Wheezy coming out, I'm trying to help any way I can but I'm having some problems. Technically they are all problems with upstream and they're all for different software. I really don't know how to deal with them to help Debian. 1. As a big regression from Squeeze, I had to blacklist an HP platform driver from loading into the kernel in order for my wireless to work well. I filed a debian bug report about it and the debian maintainers helped me collect all the information I needed and submit it to upstream. I did all that, it's been 3 weeks, and the upstream kernel platform devs seem to have completely ignored it, although linux-wireless confirmed the platform driver is doing something very strange. So I don't know what to do. Maybe I just need to wait longer? 2. About 8 months ago, an upstream developer wrote a patch to enable a feature in upstream software. Upstream didn't review the patch so it never officially made it into upstream software. Requests to review the patch by me and others are getting completely ignored upstream. The upstream dev that made the patch looks to have disappeared. Upstream seems reluctant to accept, reluctant to reject and reluctant to review, so it stays in limbo. Without upstream's proper review / approval of the patch, in addition to the fact that the patch essentially enables a feature, it's probably unlikely to ever make it into Wheezy, right? I filed a bug report saying that the feature didn't work as the feature is listed in the software as being available, but it's not actually enabled in the code. I'd imagine an NMU for enabling this feature in Wheezy would be inappropriate and the proper Debian thing to do would be to just write a different patch to remove the feature so the user doesn't see it in the software? Although, that's pretty much the exact opposite of what I'm doing on my PC so I really don't have much motivation to do that. 3. A couple months ago, an upstream developer wrote a patch to fix what I consider to be a serious bug that makes a lot of apps unusable under normal (aka "user customized") conditions. Upstream reviewed and approved the patch but the patch is written for KDE 4.9. 1. I tried applying the patch to KDE 4.8. 4 in Wheezy which ended up as a spectacular failure during compile. I asked upstream to back port the patch to kde 4.8. 4 in Debian and they said that they do not control the release of Debian and that KDE 4.8.5 is available. I'm almost certain the patch upstream wrote isn't going to work with 4.8.5 either, but I haven't tried it as I don't want to be that far away from Debian's packages. There is a work-around that's very easy to do, but it's not obvious, and it saps performance from my PC. I'm certain some Debian users running KDE will eventually run into this very annoying problem and have to Google and enable the work around. I will likely end up backporting the patch myself for my own personal needs if the workaround annoys me enough some day, which it probably will.... eventually... I worry that if I backport this patch, it might be a little ugly and probably not suitable for Debian anyway, although I really haven't looked at backporting the patch yet. 4. There appears to be a regression in some streaming libraries. When I'm running wheezy and I replace some audio streaming libraries in Wheezy with the ones from Squeeze, it fixes the same problem in several different audio players in Wheezy. What's very strange is that some other audio players don't have the problem at all in Wheezy with both the older and newer libs. I want to say that it's all the audio streaming libraries fault, but at the same time it appears that the recommended way for audio players to interface with these audio streaming libraries may have changed. It's so very complicated and I'm having a lot of trouble debugging since it's not crashing ( I wish!) and only periodically throwing out a warning or two in the background. I haven't yet contacted the audio streaming libraries because I'm trying to understand how the recommended way to interface with the streaming libraries has changed and it's very complicated. I guess I should be contacting the audio streaming devs for help/advice? Or maybe investigating the audio players to make sure they're doing the "recommended" things when they play audio? Or both? I wish I could just point and say "it's broken" as I usually do when I have problems, but it's only "partially broken" under very specific circumstances for only certain audio players which makes this a *VERY* annoying problem that's driving me crazy as it's hard to file a simple bug report for this problem. Really, I'm having a lot of problems with upstream and I'd like some help/suggestions on the "right" thing to do to help Debian. For the most part, I have been creating bug reports in both Debian and upstream and "forwarding" the debian bug report to upstream so Debian maintainers are aware of the problem.. But I'd like to do more. Thanks for any help/advice. -David -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/ca+7qwunzuo8frcu0dhzgoa96vfu1efayycsb8bbbhchwr7m...@mail.gmail.com
