Maintainer Responsibility Policy

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 09:12 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Yeah.  I think it's worthwhile to mention something like this:
> 
> "Even bugs that you aren't capable of fixing yourself because they deal 
> with intricacies of the source code that you don't have the knowledge to 
> fix deserve a few moments of your time.  You can report the bug upstream 
> for the user, ask for help from more code-oriented people on 
> fedora-devel, or check whether other distros have patches for the 
> problem.  Always be sure to post to the bug report what you have done so 
> that the reporter has a proper expectation of whether you're working on 
> a fix or if it's something that has to wait on upstream action."

I'm not sure that's strong enough. It should clearly state that the
package maintainer is responsible for getting bugs fixed -- if the
package maintainer isn't a coder, then they need to take a more
managerial röle; working with upstream or with code-monkeys within
Fedora to get things fixed. How about this:

If there are bugs which you aren't capable of fixing yourself because
they deal with intricacies of the source code which you don't fully
understand, then you still need to address these bugs. It can be helpful
to work with the upstream maintainer of the code, obtain help from more
code-oriented people on fedora-devel, or check other distributions for
patches. Always be sure to post to the bug report what you have done so
that the reporter knows what it happening and what to expect.
It is recommended that non-coder packagers should find co-maintainers
who are familiar with the programming language used by their package(s),
and can help with such bugs as a kind of 'second line support'.

-- 
dwmw2