Maintainer Responsibility Policy

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Tue May 6 14:26:27 UTC 2008


Hans Ulrich Niedermann wrote:
> Brian Pepple wrote:
> 
>> === Deal with reported bugs in a timely manner ====
>>       * 'Nuff said.
> 
> "Deal with" meaning what, exactly? When the maintainer has reported the 
> bug to upstream in a timely manner, his job is done and he can patiently 
> wait for years until upstream fixes the bug or not?
> 
A little more than that:

1) Someone who can work on the bug should know about it.
    - If the package maintainer is capable and willing, they can be 
working on fixing it.
    - If not, the package maintainer should have tried at least some of 
the following options:
     * reported it upstream.
     * asked for help on fedora-devel (there are people who volunteer 
their time to work on code/autotools problems that other package 
maintainers have)
     * checked if other distributions have patches for the problem 
already (google often finds patches in Debian, for instance.)

2) Let the bug reporter know what's going on with the bug report.  If 
that happens to be that they reported it upstream and upstream has 
proven disinterested in fixing it, having an upstream bug#, etc is very 
useful.  Then the bug reporter can try to get upstream to fix the bug 
themselves.

Brian, we probably want to list the ways to deal with bug reports in the 
policy as many maintainers don't realize how many options there are for 
getting help fixing a bug.


-Toshio




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