> Nagy Gabor wrote: > > An example: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5861 > > This is quite an old bug, and we are just waiting and waiting... > > > > Sometimes packagers are slow, sometimes upstream is slow. This is not > so surprising, the time of open source developers is always too > limited :) Putting some pressure on upstream developers might help, > especially when there is an very easy fix to a very annoying issue. > And in this case, it was probably easy to build your own fixed > package. So no big deal. > No big deal. (I've rebuilt it.) But if you also think, that it should be rebuilt, then why is sitting that buggy package in repo? I have the feeling that the main reason of "no patch" is minimizing the developer-responsibility, which is in fact understandable. To be honest, I don't like "you can do it" answers. Probably I could use LinuxFromScratch (or I could eat a spider;-), but I don't want it. I expect from my distro at least working packages. Back to the subject. I can also understand some reasons of "no-patch" viewpoint. Basically it is not a good thing, that distroX manipulates radically foo app without telling the users, that we "hacked lots of things here", and users blame the developer instead of packager. (That's why I think end-users should send bug reports to packagers; even if the package is not patched at all, a not-experienced user may not recognize that this is a packaging bug, and sends some spam to the original developers.) But I don't ask 20 patches for each packages, I ask "working packages" only, and "ratio over dogmas" in some cases. And I don't hear much complaints about the distro-patching from developers (exceptions: Jörg Schilling for example). A bit going further, I think that "patchability" is one of the main power of open source; and I see nothing wrong (fundamentally) in the common practice, that distros supply "mini-fork" packages to satisfy their users' taste in the heterogeneous linux community (some users like eye-candy others are minimalistic etc). Usually I enjoy _usable_ "vanilla" packages (that's why I am AL user). Bye