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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=547532
--- Comment #19 from Matthew Miller mattdm@mattdm.org 2010-02-24 00:06:14 EST --- On the contrary -- often the person experiencing the bug has no experience with dealing with the particular upstream project, and is actually quite poorly situated to communicate with that project. The reporter may just want their system to work, and not care to learn the intricacies of font rendering mathematics. I think the *general* rule is that package maintainers work with upstream to improve the software in various ways.
Particularly, I was struck by this as it relates to a comment in a recent LWN.net article on FOSDEM, which quotes someone speaking about another popular Linux distro thusly:
[Popular Distro] users that want to file a bug, have the choice between three options. They can file a bug upstream, where they might get flamed; they can file a bug in [Popular Disto's Parent Distro], where they are very likely to get flamed; or they can file a bug in [Popular Distro]'s [Bug Tracker], where there are very likely to get ignored.
But in this specific bug, the upstream issue is basically separate. The issue *here* is that a specfile change caused a regression. Getting the option that was turned on working properly may be interesting for upstream (or not), and presumably i*s* interesting to the packager who changed the specfile to enable it in the first place (or else, why do it?). On the other hand, for the reporter, and for Fedora in general, what's immediately interesting is fixing the regression (so that Fedora 13 doesn't have ugly fonts).