On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 12:23:34PM -0500, Mike Mestnik wrote: > There is no point in fighting about the better way if the person > advocating the better way is not willing or able to do anything more > then put pen to paper. Either write a better patch or get out of > the way of progress.
It's important to understand the role of a Debian package maintainer. They maintain packages of pre-existing software. That software sometimes requires modifying to integrate properly with the Debian system. Maintaining such a patch set is a burden. It is highly desirable that patches are integrated upstream, where appropriate, to reduce this burden, but also to share the benefits of the patch with other distributions. Maintainers are for the most part volunteers and may only have a limited amount of time that they can devote to Debian. I think that maintainers should be applauded for recognising their limits rather than biting off more than they can chew. In my opinion, it is far more damaging for a maintainer to have too much on their shoulders and to be ineffective at maintaining a package than to refuse patches that they do not believe they have the time to adequately support. Proxy support is a laudable goal and when discussing a specific patch, rather than the general possible cases, you may well find that individual maintainers welcome a patch, especially if it is trivial as you characterize. For a long time I've worked in a proxy-mandating environment and I can appreciate the problem. Proxy support should really be implemented upstream and you may find greater success tackling the problem from that end. If, when discussing a specific patch, a maintainer is not prepared to apply the patch, then there are options, it is not necessarily a stalemate situation. One option might be to add co-maintainers. -- Jon Dowland -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110923131622.GB30497@pris