bugzilla.redhat.com vs upstream bug trackers

[Eric Smith]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Jeffrey Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us> wrote:
> In no way should packagers be expected to provide end-user support for
> packages, be an expert in every aspect of a package, or be expected to
> work with upstream to debug issues because the end user is unwilling
> to do the work themselves (in essence becoming an upstream developer
> themselves).

I agree.  For some of the packages I maintain, I am able to do some
bug fixing myself, and forward the patches upstream.  For other
packages, I have done the packaging because I use the software, but I
am not at all knowledgeable about the innards, and get lost quickly
trying to fix any bugs.  I think it's reasonable in those cases to
advise that the user report the bugs upstream.

If there was consensus that handling it that way was bad, and that the
package maintainer had to accept more responsibility for bug fixing,
then I'd be happy to hand over the package maintenance duties to
another Fedora package maintainer that was willing to do that.

> Well, let's take Asterisk.  First off, there are a lot of components

That's a good example, but I think there are a lot of packages far
simpler than that which are still too complicated to necessarily
expect the Fedora packager to do all of the software maintenance.

Eric