Colin Walters (walters@redhat.com) said:
Anyways, I just spoke up because recently I discovered Debian was patching some of my software - the patch was useful, but did I ever get a bug filed in the issue tracker or a post to the discussion group? Nope. Now I've been guilty of this myself before in the past, and in fact I maintained the GStreamer package years ago, and didn't do anything to try to work with upstream on the mp3 issue. Now I think people do talk too blithely about patching or modifying upstream as just part of "packaging"; there is a lot of responsibility to be taken with the power to patch.
Waaaaaaaay back in the day (i.e., before Fedora) we asked the upstream of the first of these packages (XMMS) about it. They weren't interested in doing a release with it removed themselves.
Bill