Re: When to get the upstream maintainer involved.
> Is there policy manual material on when to get the upstream maintainer
> involved in a problem? If not, we need to insert some.
>
> In general, you should _not_ bother the upstream maintainer until you
> have determined that there is a bug in their program. Specificaly:
>
> * Debian handles it own user support. We do not pass user correspondence
> on to the upstream maintainer before we know what is wrong.
I'm not sure. When I still was maintaining Xfig, I had one user
report an apparently video card related bug (only was triggered
by one video card, if I remember correctly). I didn't have that
video card, so I didn't know myself what was wrong.
Should I not have sent a note to the maintainer, just informing him
that someone had seen this? (Hoping that the maintainer would recognise
the problem, by reports from other people).
> If you find that you don't understand a package well enough to diagnose
> it, it's probably a good idea for you to swap that package for another,
> with a maintainer who can handle it better.
Someone want to take over "screen" from me? I don't feel at all competent!
If I don't maintain it, then apparently it gets orphaned, and I don't want
that to happen. I have had someone send me a bugreport (+patch), where
I (IIRC) didn't even understand the problem at the source of the bugreport,
never mind the patch. Naturally, I asked the person who sent me the bugreport
if he wanted to take over the package, but he declined. Should I then
just say "sorry, I'm not allowed to forward your patch upstream"?
Yes, I think in general we (debian maintainers) should do as much work
as possible. But I think it should be possible to discuss things with
upstream, whenever the maintainer things that would be the best thing
to do.
--
joost witteveen, joostje@debian.org
#!/usr/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)
#what's this? see http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/
Reply to: