>>>>> "Stephane" == Stephane Bortzmeyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Stephane> On Monday 29 March 1999, at 1 h 17, the keyboard of Adam Di Stephane> Carlo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> * check that patches that should be sent upstream are being sent >> upstream -- I think this is very important and I think we have a >> bit of a bad reputation on this count. Stephane> Could you elaborate? After all, source packages are Stephane> available for the upstream developers. If you think this is an adequate way to get patches upstream, that is very very very sad. What else can I say? I thought we were here to work with free software, to make it better. Most maintainers fulfull the promise and actively work with upstream maintainers on bugs and patches. To not do this, with the excuse, "oh, well it's publicly available", is weak. Patches need to be selected out of the .diff.gz by the package maintainer and sent to the upstream maintainer -- push it upstream, don't rely on upstream to look downstream. >> (d) Perhaps another cron job, implementing a public emailing to >> debian-devel, listing the top 100 packages with huge debian diffs. Stephane> This seems a poor metric. Yes, it is rather poor, but its the best I could think of. Stephane> One of the packages I maintain Stephane> (ncbi-tools6-dev) has a documentation of 300 pages in Stephane> MS-Word format. I translated it in ASCII and put in the Stephane> source package. Does it qualify me as "not sending patches Stephane> upstream"? Stephane> Also, the upstream maintainers have a bad reputation, too Stephane> :-) queso in Debian now has a lot of patches which are Stephane> silently ignored by the upstream maintainer (64 bits Stephane> support, for instance). We are actually forking. You have to continue to try to get a response out of the upstream maintainer. Like I said, it's a culture thing. Stephane> The Stephane> maintainer of phylip, when I sent him the patches for glibc Stephane> support, replied that he already had them in his private Stephane> area for a long time but did not bother to make a new Stephane> release :-( This sort of behaviour does not push me to send Stephane> patches upstream anymore. Letting a few bad experienced stop you from actually improving free software is bad. >> Start pushing harder for maintainers to try to work out fixes with >> the upstream maintainers -- this is a cultural issue. (Maybe even >> a lintian warning if the debian diff has lots of patches not under >> the debian subdir?) Stephane> So, when an upstream maintainer no longer replies, I will be Stephane> castigated? No, but you should be castigated if you indeed have stopped sending patches upstream, as you claimed above. To me, this isn't acceptable. Sure, some of them may not respond; some may flame you. You just have to keep trying, gently, diplomatically, pointing out the problems and the fixes. I'm not saying every day -- that would be annoying. Just every few months. -- .....Adam Di [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
