On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 03:03:30PM -0700, i...@bandshed.net wrote:
I truly appreciate what Adrian is proposing and appreciate as always that willingness to help especially with JACK and ffado etc.I do understand that an idea like Adrian's somewhat can be seen as a 'slippery slope' and if you let one mongrel dog in from the cold soon you will have ten of them all with specific needs that differ from Debian's core mandate.
Either I lost you or you are confusing who said what:Benjamin suggests to tell your users to bypass us and go straight upstream with bugs in upstream code.
I recommend to report all bugs at the upstream level closest to you, the way that upstream level prefer to have them reported.
Adrian suggests that you systematically add a hint that the packages are tied to a derived distribution. I am not against that specifically, but am concerned generally that lowers awareness among _end-users_ about who are their closest upstream compared to who they are reporting bugs to.
It seems to me that the "mongrel dog" you are talking about is derived distributions, and that I dislike working with those. I don't! I love Debian being used - both directly by end-users and by indirectly via derived distributions like yours.
My concern is another: It is to help you as derivative and your users to maintain a good relationship with Debian. Debian consists of a big bunch of individuals and teams, not all of them equally happy working with bugreports coming from all corners of the world. Heck, some even dislike working on bugs coming from me, even if I am a Debian Developer for 10+ years. One thing I believe helps in communication is to talk straight. Here it means that the person filing a bugreport - end-users of your derived distro - are aware that they are using a derivative, and that they are filing the bugreport and discussing it with someone who are quite likely unfamiliar with that particular derivation and might have political opinions against working with derivatives or whatever. I believe it is better to educate end-users about this than to add a tag to the initial bugreport.
It is not lost on me that the rigorous and unflinching adherence to it's ideals and conventions is what make Debian the wonder that it is, and what makes it the ideal choice for projects like mine.To be blunt what I am asking really is for you to be aware of my project and in the infrequent case that a bug report comes your way for a pkg-multimedia issue to say "OK we've heard of it and we'll see if we can help" rather than 'AV Linux...never heard of it, go away!"
If (or when, because it _does_ happen) we say "go away" to _indirect_ users of Debian, I believe we violate ยง4 of the Debian Social Contract:
Our priorities are our users and free software
Indirect users are users too, IMO. Some may disagree and say that only direct users of Debian are "our users" which means it is only our priority to talk to _you_ the maintainer of the derivative, not your users.
Since Adrian do not suggest to have you always work as proxy between your users and us, I feel we basically agree on interpreting as indirect users also being our users. And I recommend to help teach them what is the relationship when they report bugs directly to their "grandparents".
- Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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