[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#760740: [ligthdm, lightdm-gtk-greeter] version policy

[Luca Saiu]

Hello.

I'm part of a small but very motivated development team in France aiming
at improving debian accessibility for blind and visually-impaired users.
I work with Jean-Philippe Mengual, Ksamak and Raphaël Poitevin -- I'm
sure some people on the list already know us.  Our work will be based on
MATE and Compiz/Emerald.  Rather than maintaining forks we want to
actively contribute to debian and upstream.

Please forgive me for asking naïve questions; even if I'm a longtime
GNU/Linux and debian user this is my first real experience with debian
packaging.  Feel free to redirect me to more appropriate resources or
forums whenever needed.

In an attempt to solve debian bug 760740 at bugs.debian.org before Samuel
Thibault's recent fix, and also to activate the screen reader in
lightdm-gtk-greeter accessible, I had started with upstream code for
lightdm and lightdm-gtk-greeter directly from Launchpad, using the
bleeding-edge unreleased version.

I see that Samuel backported some code related to screen-reader support
in lightdm-gtk-greeter, (I suppose) in order for changes to be included
in the next stable debian release without causing disruption; that's of
course very reasonable, even if in the particular case of our local
French team we could afford to provide unofficial debian packages in a
private repository of ours as a temporary measure for our users, before
our contributions get officially integrated, possibly in a later debian
release.

Up to this point I've been guilty of not interacting with the community.
I'm starting now.  What should I do in the future?  In particular, what
is the policy with respect to package versions included in debian, when
the upstream version is considerably more recent than what debian
already ships?  Can (and should) we "skip" versions and proceed to
package a software which is possibly several versions more recent than
the one in debian sid?

Best regards,

-- 
Luca Saiu      http://ageinghacker.net
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