Jonathan,<br><br>You are looking at this from a most Debian-centric POV. There are 100 distros. OK, there are only 20 popular ones, only 5 notable ones and only 1 great one :-) but perhaps if I phrased it thus:<br><br>"The discoverer of a NON-DISTRO SPECIFIC bug cannot be responsible for contacting EACH distro."<br>
<br>If I'm working on a Perl app on some other non-Debian distro and the bug I discover is pretty obviously not distro-specific then are you suggesting I report it to Debian? If so are you suggesting I report it also to Suse, RH, Ubuntu etc? No. The place to report it is to that distro's bug tracking system (if they have one) and <a href="http://rt.cpan.org">rt.cpan.org</a>. If I don't report it to CPAN how will Debian ever get to know of the bug?<br>
<br>If I find a bug in a four year old version of a package but that is the current version that is distributed in every Linux distro then there needs to be a central place for the bug report. Where is that? It is <a href="http://rt.cpan.org">rt.cpan.org</a>. And I believe RT admin agrees (on this narrow point, at least). That's the position we are in with SQL::Statement<br>
<br>This bug I have reported to Ubuntu via Launchpad. At the moment I have not reported it formally to Debian as I temporarily only have Woody because that's the last Debian with a working libsql-statement-perl i.e. SQL::Statement 0.1020. I have verified it on Etch and Lenny but that machine is dead so I cannot report version numbers etc exactly. I have reported it to CPAN for the benefit of everyone. And so the package maintainer can consider if it applies to the latest version of the package. It does and therefore, as it is such a critical bug, the package should perhaps not be accepted by Debian. But it has been! A few days before my bug report. And had I not been so tenacious the bug report would have remained "rejected" or "deleted", not "open", and you would not know of it. Ever. After a while you would stop including libsql-statement-perl in Debian because NOBODY uses it BECAUSE IT IS UNUSABLE by anyone who wants a simple SQL UPDATE statement to work. <br>
<br>There is a lot of excellent code available from CPAN from a lot of most dedicated developers/maintainers and testers and documenters and, dare I say, bug reporters! Thanks to any of you who read this. However, it is *not* ALL of excellent quality, and being shy of saying so can be part of the problem. That doesn't mean to say that some packages are more challenging than others to maintain. Some maintainers have bravely taken on packages which are in a mess and which need lots of work. Some maintainers have an easy life! Others slog their guts out for no thanks. And in their spare time. But the quality of the packages and their maintenance does vary, package to package.<br>
<br>Paul Beardsell<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/11/4 Jonathan Yu <span dir="ltr"><<a href="http://jonathan.i.yu">jonathan.i.yu</a>@<a href="http://gmail.com">gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi Paul:<br>
<br>