On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 7:49 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > It's package maintainers responsibility to act as the liason between > upstream and Fedora thus reporters only need to report in our Bugzilla > instance. I think that this is a fantasy that is not going to happen unless every package maintainer's primary employment is maintaining said packages (not necessarily employed by Red Hat). I'm sure that I'm representative of many packagers out there - I'm not paid to maintain packages in Fedora, in fact any open source I get to use at work is because I've been successful at asking for forgiveness instead of permission. I maintain packages in Fedora because it allows me to get what I want to do done, whether at work or at home. Since I've done the work of making these packages, why not share them with the Fedora community? It drives me absolutely bonkers when people open bugs on the RedHat bugzilla and then insist that I do the work of coordinating with upstream because they are "too busy" or they "don't want to create a bunch of accounts in the upstream bugtracker". I mean it drives me absolutely bonkers to the point I have trouble remaining polite. In fact I've completely ignored a bug in RedHat's bugzilla for months because of the reporter's attitude that their time was so much more valuable than mine that I can't read the bug, much less post a response without resorting to nasty four-letter words. The work that I do in maintaining my packages is my contribution back to the community that has given me so much already. For most bug reports, I'm willing to take a little bit of time and see if there's a new release I've missed or if the bug has been already identified upstream and there's a patch that can be applied. But to expect me to take a significant amount of time to work with upstream to find the bug and patch it is unrealistic because: 1) There's a 99.999% chance that I don't have the resources (either hardware or software) to reproduce the bug. 2) There's a 100% chance that I don't have the time between work and family obligations. 3) Even though I'm an excellent programmer, well versed in C and Python, and decent in Perl, Ruby, et. al. I probably don't have the familiarity with the codebase to even know where to start looking for a bug. 4) Most software is complex enough that even configuration problems are best handled by upstream because I'd be familiar with a small set of configuration scenarios, but everyone's situation is unique and understanding what exactly a configuration option does (especially in edge cases) often requires an understanding of the code behind it. All of this means that I'm a speedbump in the way of getting the bug fixed, at least until there's a patch that needs to be applied to the package, or a new release to upgrade to. -- Jeff Ollie -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
