An interesting read when discussing what to do about our bugs...

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed Jan 23 20:06:22 UTC 2008


On Jan 20, 2008 10:36 PM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> A reporter should never be supposed to talk upstream, because he is
> reporting an issue a problem with the product (your package) you are
> supposed to be responsible for, not against the product an upstream
> ships to you (the source tarball).

I think you are wrong. Dead wrong.
it does absolutely no good for me to attempt to act as a proxy for
hardware breakage that I can't re-confirm with my own hardware.  At
some point the person experiencing the hardware problem has to be able
to talk directly with a developer who is in a position to confirm and
fix.  Whether that means driving upstream developers to the fedora
bugreport or driving users to upstream developers.... it doesn't
matter. I refuse..REFUSE... to stop asking users with hardware
specific breakage to be proactive and tap into the upstream resource
when I can't confirm the problem.

If there is a feature request that needs discussion, then why exactly
should I as a maintainer be the one to champion it? If it's something
i've no personal interest in it, nor have a personal need for it, then
I'm certainly not in a position to argue for it.  The stake holders
for those sort of discussions are in the upstream development
communication channels... that's where feature roadmapping
happens...and that's where features have to be discussed and
integrated.  I'm not going to stand in proxy for someone else's ideas
that do not resonate with me.  Nor am I going to drop a request on the
floor at the fedora package level, because I personally unmoved by a
particular feature request.  I'm not such an egotistical bastard that
I'm going to assume that just because I'm not interested in the
feature as the Fedora package maintainer that the upstream developers
aren't.

> What prevents you from simply telling the truth?

I do tell the truth...sometimes upstream communication is a useful
thing...and continuing to rely on me as the Fedora package maintainer
to do all of it, is in fact a sub-optimal way of making sure things
get done.  I suck and I'll proudly and forthrightly tell people that.

-jef




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