what's the point of filing bugs against Fedora?

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 14, 2014, at 11:19 AM, Tethys <tethys at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
> 
>> If the bug is a packaging or dependency related bug, then use RHBZ. If it's
>> a feature request, or broken feature that surely would affect every distro's
>> instance of that component, then file it upstream. Often the Fedora package
>> maintainer literally just makes sure the packaging is done correctly for
>> Fedora.
> 
> True, but equally the package often comes with a bunch of
> Fedora-specific modifications.

I don't know how common that is because it's a lot of effort to create even slight let alone significant derivatives of upstream work. But if it is such a package then you may be better off filing a bug against it in the RHBZ.

> The end user has no way of knowing if
> it's a bug in the base package or in the Fedora supplied patches.
> Plus, my experience of reporting bugs upstream has invariably been to
> be told "don't use the Fedora package, try compiling our latest
> version from source and report back if you still have problems with
> that". That's a poor experience for most end users.

Make sure the Fedora maintainer is being cc'd on those. Even if upstream had a way to see RHBZ bugs, I don't see how your example is avoided. If they think they have a fix in a newer base, then that's what you'd have to do or suffer with the bug until the next release. Buck passing happens to me with some regularity on OS X. The difference is "build new upstream version located here and report back" isn't even an option. So sure, tedious, do it or don't do it, your choice. But I don't see how this could work any differently than it does now, so I don't really understand what you're suggesting.


Chris Murphy