Nagy Gabor wrote:
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.
LFS isn't vanilla either, the goal is to get a working system in the end, so they patch when needed. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter03/patches.html However, it's probably as vanilla as possible, quite like Arch in my opinion.
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).
Again, when there is a really unusable / broken package, it's very likely not because of the vanilla philosophy, but because of the lack of time of developers. And as far as I am concerned, Arch provides working packages, so I would say it's doing pretty well overall. There are probably exceptions that confirm the rule, but that's life, nothing is perfect :)