I wanted to ask about how others treat patching. My understanding of our patching philosophy is:
1) Don't patch if doing so makes us un-vanilla. Users familiar with the standard behavior of software should be able to rely on our packaged versions to behave the same way.
2) If there's some major roadblock (crash, hang, data loss, chronic incompatibility), apply a reasonable patch as a workaround, as long as this kind of patch for this kind of problem has not been rejected upstream. Report the bug and patch upstream, and remove the patch from our package when upstream integrates a fix.
3) We don't maintain upstream software; we should not do a lot of work to patch unmaintained software.
Is this a good summary? Or do others have differing views on some of this? Things to add?
- P
