[Utnubu-discuss] Ubuntu patches

[Stephan Hermann]

Hi,

On Saturday 14 January 2006 16:21, Philipp Kern wrote:
> Stephan Hermann wrote:

> > But, as you can see it now with the Ubuntu Universe Developers, they do
> > care, and trying to fix issues with even packages, where upstream (in
> > ubuntus case it's debian) is not responsive.
>
> Ew. That's another problem. Debian maintainers sometimes complain that
> they do not get informed about problems on the Ubuntu side of life, or
> are not fed with patches. Please file bug reports with patches in
> Debian's bugtracker if the maintainer is un-responsive. Like that others
> could prepare NMUs and QA uploads for the package.

I'm doing so, and I'm thinking of pushing everything which comes through my 
hands to Debian. Even if the patches are against a new real upstream version 
(like boson-base now :)) The problem I have with this difficult situation is, 
that, and I speak here only for my person, that I'm concentrating on Ubuntu, 
trying to stick to our schedules, which means, that sometimes, it's quite 
hard to have the time to think about filing bugs. 
Whenever I think about it, I do file bugs. 


> > The problem for us, in this case, that we don't know about those facts,
> > that the maintainer don't have time anymore to work on his packages.
>
> Well, it's no problem to contact mia at qa.debian.org -- which is a role
> alias which currently goes at least to Jeroen, who you could query about
> individual maintainers. Poeple who don't yet have a MIA record but for
> which you query information are then checked. It's just that the MIA
> database itself is not public and only accessable for DDs.

Well, there we have the same problem of missing "patches" but only the other 
way around. But as I said, our faster release cycles are not allowing 
sometimes to care about this. It's sad, it's bad, but this happens. And 
sometimes we have to live with it, or we find the time to find out what 
happening.
But to be honest, if one maintainer is not responsive in a certain ammount of 
time, that I really not interested anymore to contribute my patches towards 
him/her, because I don't get an answer. Therefore, even with a lot of 
technical solutions, this can't be solved, because it's a social problem, and 
we see on d-d now, that some manners are lost, regarding some posts on d-d.

> > Good thing to know, even for Debian, that development goes on, eventually
> > not directly in Debian, but in Ubuntu. And if I'm not working for Ubuntu
> > anymore, there are others, who will take my place, and doing the work :)
> > (That is why I don't like this strict maintainer ship model of Debian)
>
> We have open NMU season, haven't we? ;) And there are more and more
> project with group maintainance. It's just that some maintainers
> directly assigned to a package certainly know it and that they could
> solve issues in a timely manner instead of noone caring about the
> package, under the condition that they are not MIA and not overloaded
> with other work.

Yes, but if someone sees, that an RC bug (e.g. a transition is ongoing, and 
the maintainer doesn't upload a fix in lets say one week) and is doing an 
NMU, it can be, that the maintainer is just complaining about the work which 
was done for him. It happend and will happen every now and then again.
Really, when I'm touching a package, I'm reading through the debian/ dir 
source, and if I have to patch the upstream source code, I need to be sure 
what I'm doing. It doesn't mean, that I'm involved in the upstream project, 
or that I have to be the original author. It's just a matter of doing my 
work. And there are some packages (like kernel, glibc, d-i) I would never 
touch (which can change in the future, when I'm interested enough to break my 
system :)), because I think I don't have the knowledge. So I leave those 
things to others.

> > Solution: I'll ask some of our fellow MOTUs, who are, hooray, DDs, too,
> > to do an NMU upload for the new upstream version.
> > What do you think?
>
> Not an NMU. Take it over, anyhow... e.g. do it the collaborative way,
> like Reinhard suggested.

Agreed :) Well, I just fixed one issue, and slomo uploaded the new upstream 
version, so if the game team of Debian is taking our changes, please :) 

And now back to my cleaning libXft.la adventure..

\sh