*- On 19 Nov, Salman Ahmed wrote about "Re: xemacs text-mode and gpm mouse issues" >>>>>> "IZ" == Ian Zimmerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > IZ> Ian, who was upstream gpm maintainer for a while. > > Can someone explain to me what/who upstream and downstream maintainers > are ? I've never quite figured out upstream/downstream relative to > who or what!! >
Upstream are the actual authors of the code. As an example Eric Raymond is the upstream maintainer of fetchmail. The downstream or Debian maintainer is the Debian developer who packages it up and makes sure that it works well with the Debian distribution, in this case for fetchmail that is Paul Haggart. The downstream maintainer is the first line of contact for the user. The downstream maintainer evaluates the bug reports that are sent to the Debian bug tracking system and tries to find a fix for it. If they can fix it and it is a local Debian problem then they fix it with the next package release. If they can fix it and it is an upstream problem then they forward the fix upstream to the software author for possible inclusion in the main source tree. Each distribution generally works like this. Thus there are many downstream maintainers all sending filtered bug reports back to the upstream maintainer. This saves the upstream author from having to deal with large numbers of bugs reports that may not be directly related tot the actual sorce code. My $.02, -- Brian Servis -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mechanical Engineering | Never criticize anybody until you Purdue University | have walked a mile in their shoes, [EMAIL PROTECTED] | because by that time you will be a http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~servis | mile away and have their shoes.