Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, 2008-03-14 at 15:18 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Colin Walters (walters at redhat.com) said: 
> > Anyways, I just spoke up because recently I discovered Debian was
> > patching some of my software - the patch was useful, but did I ever get
> > a bug filed in the issue tracker or a post to the discussion group?
> > Nope.  Now I've been guilty of this myself before in the past, and in
> > fact I maintained the GStreamer package years ago, and didn't do
> > anything to try to work with upstream on the mp3 issue.   Now I think
> > people do talk too blithely about patching or modifying upstream as just
> > part of "packaging"; there is a lot of responsibility to be taken with
> > the power to patch.
> 
> Waaaaaaaay back in the day (i.e., before Fedora) we asked the upstream
> of the first of these packages (XMMS) about it. They weren't interested
> in doing a release with it removed themselves.

Yeah, not every upstream is as good as Thomas is; on the other hand, few
are worse than XMMS =)