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
