[arch-general] Upstream bugs, patches

[Nagy Gabor]

> Nagy Gabor wrote:
> > An example: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5861
> > This is quite an old bug, and we are just waiting and waiting...
> > 
> 
> Sometimes packagers are slow, sometimes upstream is slow. This is not
> so surprising, the time of open source developers is always too
> limited :) Putting some pressure on upstream developers might help,
> especially when there is an very easy fix to a very annoying issue.
> And in this case, it was probably easy to build your own fixed
> package. So no big deal.
> 

No big deal. (I've rebuilt it.) But if you also think, that it should be
rebuilt, then why is sitting that buggy package in repo? I have the feeling
that the main reason of "no patch" is minimizing the
developer-responsibility, which is in fact understandable. To be
honest, I don't like "you can do it" answers. Probably I could use
LinuxFromScratch (or I could eat a spider;-), but I don't want it. I
expect from my distro at least working packages.

Back to the subject.
I can also understand some reasons of "no-patch" viewpoint. Basically
it is not a good thing, that distroX manipulates radically foo
app without telling the users, that we "hacked lots of things here", and
users blame the developer instead of packager. (That's why I think
end-users should send bug reports to packagers; even if the package is
not patched at all, a not-experienced user may not recognize that this
is a packaging bug, and sends some spam to the original developers.)
But I don't ask 20 patches for each packages, I ask "working packages"
only, and "ratio over dogmas" in some cases.

And I don't hear much complaints about the distro-patching from
developers (exceptions: Jörg Schilling for example). A bit going
further, I think that "patchability" is one of the main power of open
source; and I see nothing wrong (fundamentally) in the common practice,
that distros supply "mini-fork" packages to satisfy their users' taste
in the heterogeneous linux community (some users like eye-candy
others are minimalistic etc). Usually I enjoy _usable_ "vanilla"
packages (that's why I am AL user).

Bye