On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 13:54 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > I'm involved in sponsoring a proogram (meshlab, ITP #426581) where > I've discovered that it phones home with statistical information about > the files being used, and so forth. I'm working with upstream and > with the prospective maintainer to resolve this and I don't think > there will be any difficulty for the specific package. > > But I was rather surprised to find this situation. It looks like the > prospective maintainer was aware of the phoning home but didn't > consider it a release-critical bug; they are also reluctant to > override upstream's wishes without some clear Debian policy statement > to the effect that this is not permissible.
I'm unclear about this "override upstream's wishes" part. I have heard this kind of thing a number of times, and I strongly disagree with it. Debian is not a conduit for upstream packages to get conveniently compiled for Debian, is it? It's a coherent system. Debian maintainers have the job of making their packages DTRT, whether upstream does that or not, whether upstream agrees or not. It should not even be thought of, at all, in terms of "overriding". It should be a matter of doing the right thing. The right thing here seems abundantly clear, and I have no objection to a suitable statement in Debian policy. But that's not the only point... It sounds as if the maintainer is saying that upstream gets some kind of veto, which can only be overridden if there is a "clear Debian policy statement" on the point, and that is a mistaken and buggy approach. Upstream doesn't get a veto. There are good social and technical reasons not to deviate from upstream without good reasons, but this is a good reason, whether there is a "clear policy" or not. Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
