Andy Smith wrote:
It would appear that Debian have a habit of making changes that do not
get fed back upstream;
That's a bit unfair. One maintainer made a mistake. There is a
vast amount of software in Debian and humans make mistakes, so yes
this sort of thing happens from time to time.
My comment was more about the fact that changes get made fairly
routinely to tweak applications for the distro and which do not get fed
back upstream; the vast majority of these changes are not relevant
upstream, however it does mean that its possible to make a change that
had the right people seen it upstream they'd have rejected it.
To describe it as a habit was unfortunate because of the connotations it
carried, and was maybe a response to having spent a lot of today
updating servers when I had better things to do. It's not fair to blame
Debian for that without also giving them massive credit for the fact
that patching my servers against vulnerabilities is usually a case of
"apt-get upgrade", rather than chasing reports, downloading patches and
dealing with it all myself; without Debian and others like them it would
be a rare day indeed that I had time to do anything other than patch my
servers. So the tone of my email was very unfair and I apologise to any
Debian package maintainers within range.
It would be nice if one result of this is that patches do get more
readily accepted upstream (and therefore bad patches rejected by people
qualified to recognise them as such). If you download a typical source
package and look at the number of Debian patches which are included (and
add to that the Ubuntu ones on top of that) this kind of thing was bound
to happen. It is a good thing that Debian, rather than OpenSSH, is
getting the "blame" for this, but it's almost certainly a better thing
that procedures will grow out of this that will improve systems for the
future.
--
Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555
Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
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