Upstream first? [Was: Re: The future of how to debug pages]

[Kamil Paral]

> > What would you prefer? Upstream balancing five bug reports in five
> > downstream bug trackers (plus his own) and wasting ton of time just
> > coordinating and communicating with them, or five bug reporters
> > (and
> > their package maintainers, if required) working with the upstream
> > in
> > the upstream bug tracker?
> > 
> > I understand that it is not possible always (given the character of
> > the component in question, or because bug reporters are not able to
> > work with the upstream code, and of course it could genuinely be a
> > packaging bug or bug caused by other components in the distro), but
> > when it is possible, I think it should be preferred.
> 
> -1.
> 
> The Fedora maintainers are supposed to bring the upstream to the
> distribution and maintain it there. The Fedora users are supposed
> to use the distribution, not compile the upstream themselves. It's
> the Fedora maintainer that should do the communication with the
> upstream (they have accounts in the upstream bug tracking systems).
> And it's the Fedora maintainers that should release erratas, fixing
> the distribution for users of said distribution.

In my opinion this should be a maintainer choice. Ideally there would be a support for this choice in Bugzilla. When reporting a new bug against component X, "bug reporting guidelines" would be displayed (Launchpad already supports this). The guidelines can say "Please report all your bugs here" (or be empty), or they can also say "If you bug looks like this, it is a probably packaging bug, report it here. If you bug looks like that, it is possibly an upstream bug, please report it at URL".

Why this should be a maintainer choice? Because it is his time and energy investment. Speaking for myself, I would be willing to package and maintain some great packages for Fedora, but only if I don't have to do a "full support", but just "packaging support". I don't have time nor knowledge for full-fledged support for various projects. So here's the choice - either we give the decision to maintainers and we might have a lot of software packaged in Fedora, or we force them to do full support, and we will have just the most common software in Fedora (but "perfectly" supported </irony>).

Also please note that "half support" is not the definitive state of the package, any time a skilled project enthusiast might appear, co-maintain the project and raise the support level from "half" to "full".