Maintainer Responsibilities

Tim Waugh twaugh at redhat.com
Thu Jun 4 09:01:56 UTC 2009


My own opinion is that the package maintainer is responsible for
reporting bugs upstream when they are able to reproduce them.

One reason for my belief is that I've seen the situation from the other
side: as an upstream maintainer for a package, getting bug reports
directly from users of a packaged version in another operating system.

It can be a frustrating experience because the person reporting the bug
can never be quite sure which version they are using (due to additional
patches used in packaging), and generally are not able to try out
suggested patches or pull from a source code repository.

My point is that it isn't only the people reporting bugs that get
frustrated by "go report it upstream", it is also the larger free
software community.

Another reason for maintainers to give bug reports due diligence is that
it is hard to report bugs.  Package maintainers may not always
appreciate this, since they do it all the time, but look at bugzilla as
though you've never seen it before (or just remember back to when you
first saw it) -- it is hard to fill out a huge form, and if the problem
is not severe enough to warrant your time on it (or you aren't even sure
if it's a bug) you may just not bother.

Bug reporters are absolutely essential to healthy free software and
should be treated with respect.  They are our eyes.

Roll on ABRT.

Tim.
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