While the following is not as applicable to the debian packaging example, it's still on-point.
I'll also add that it's penny-wise and pound-foolish for us to take patches that fix something for 1 specific case and have it break things for anybody else. The people who submit patches that are readily included in the distribution are folks who make sure they have *portable* solutions. If we get a patch that is clearly non-portable, it sits there until somebody else (a volunteer) can look at it and figure out how to implement the fix in a portable way. Sometimes it helps seeing what somebody comes up with. Sometimes it's not all that helpful. If the issue is one that affects a lot of people, it will get attention sooner than an issue that affects fewer people. Remember, we have a *lot* of open issues out there and each volunteer chooses the bugs they work on, and how much time they choose to spend on NTP. I'm currently paid to put in 15-20 hours/week on NTP development, and I'm working on the highest-priority bugs that are blocking the release of 4.2.8. I put in *many* more hours as a volunteer on NTP, and many more still for NTF. Put another way, NTP is successful because it approaches timekeeping from a "wide scope". It is running on many tens of millions of devices that cover a wide range of operating conditions. The volunteers who actively work on the project have a wide-scope attitude, too. They may not have started with a wide-scope attitude, but their "usefulness" to the project (and to NTP's constituency) are directly related to how well they can embrace this wider-scope attitude. We do have some volunteers who have a narrow focus. They work in limited areas. H _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions
