[Sven Luther] > I am not saying that there needs to be an immediate response, or all > patches need to be applied, but i believe that it is elementary > politeness from a package maintainer, to at least aknowledge a patch > or bug report when it is submitted.
I believe you are wrong. If you are right, then I am a very impolite maintainer, as I have too many packages with too many bugs to look after, so I do not manage to look at, nor acknowledge and comment on, all the reported bugs against them, nor evaluate or commit the patches provided. But I try my best, and fail to see why your assumption that my behavior is impolite can in any way be correct. > As for the bug reporter, and the patch submitter, being ignored > for a long time when it is clear there is activity, is a proof > that his work in searching for the bug, and in trying (even if > clumsily) to find a patch is wasted time, and motivation to do so > in the future will fall. Well, I believe a bug reporter and patch submitter is better off if she accepts the rewarding thoughts of a job well done, and not waste time waiting for others to acknowledge it too. Working on free software need to be self motivated, or one will end up very frustrated as there is almost no external rewards. All we can do is to make sure the bugs we find and the patches we create are published and easy to find for the others that work on the same package and find the same problem, and then work with the upstream developers and distribution maintainers to get them to look at the issue. Expecting this to happen by itself after submitting an email without careful attention from the bug reporter or patch writer is not going to cause anything but grief and frustration. I've sent hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of patches to developers and maintainers, and had lots of them ignored for a long time. There is no point for me to accuse the developers and maintainers of anything but having other priorities than me and having other things to spend time on. The only way to try to get them to look at "my" issue is by talking to them and attract their attention to the issue. And as the lead developer of debian-edu, a contributing member of debian-gis and debian-java, a long time contributor of debian-installer and a vocal proponent of working in groups within debian, I believe I have some experience to back my claim that my approach work and lower the frustration level of working on free software. Yes, it is still a bit frustrating to see patches submitted to BTS being ignored for years, but at least I know that the responsivility for this is on my end, not having spend enough time working with the developer and maintainer to get him to give the task enough priority. It does no good to try to blame anyone else but myself for this, and I recommend the rest of you to place the blame there as well. :) Friendly, -- Petter Reinholdtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]