On Thursday 11 March 2010 00:01:58 Paul Mattal wrote:
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. I am totally agree with these rules. I don't like to patch software to provides this or that feature, but we need to patch a software that does not work due a bug fixed upstream.
People can edit and rebuild packages using ABS and/or AUR. "Arch was made to work with you, not for you" [A. Griffin] :) -- Andrea