Maintainer Responsibilities

Francis Earl francis.earl at gmail.com
Thu Jun 4 19:44:59 UTC 2009


I think a package maintainers responsibilities should be to incorporate
any back-ported bug fixes, and ensure the package is reasonably fit for
end users... if they can't do this, I don't think they should be
packaging that software (whether it be due to individual skill set, or
simply the upstream state).

I wish Bugzilla had a way to track bugs in different instances of
itself, that way once a package maintainer has figured out it's not a
packaging issue, he can simply send it upstream, and have it all tracked
as one bug from there - propagating that to whatever other instances
have linked to it (read other distros with the same bug). This would
simplify a lot of things for maintainers, and save them a lot of time
also.

Things like the auto-crash handler will help with users that don't wish
to learn technical details, with the debugfs simplifying everything
fairly well to ensure bug reports are useful. This often results in
repeated bug reports though, so I hope they take lessons learned from
apport into account here.

Overall, I do not believe that package maintainers need to necessarily
be programmers, and I believe upstream should have some say in most bug
fixes. Of course it helps if they actually know the software, rather
than just being competent with the packaging tools, but that starts to
raise the barrier for contribution, so I don't know if requiring that is
a good idea... what I state above goes a long way to ensuring they don't
need to be programmers though.




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