On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 10:43:29PM +0200, Nagy Gabor wrote:
Hi!
I'm new to this list, and my English is far from perfect, please tolerate it ;-)
I am/was a big fan of ArchLinux, I'm using it from 0.5 version, I also made some little contributions to pacman, but now I noticed some tendencies which I cannot accept. So I would like to hear the official "standpoint" about a certain question, before I may drop my good old distro. I also think that this question is important to all end-users.
(Aaron:) I know that I'm not popular here, but I hope that you won't answer "against me" ;-)
Some foreword (sorry, maybe off, I would like to manipulate thoughts :-D): Basically I think that principles are _not_ rules. So things like KISS and "vanilla packages" are good for defining ourselves in one sentence (in wikipedia for example), but I don't really understand reasoning like "foo violates KISS" (IMHO the reasoning should say, _why_ it worth applying KISS here.). When I _describe_ myself as liberal, I won't deduce my acts from this "rule"... (theoretical example).
So the question: Do/Should Archlinux packagers apply unofficial or merged-but-not-yet-released patches to fix an existing _bug_ of a released package? An example: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5861 This is quite an old bug, and we are just waiting and waiting...
If the answer no, do packagers forward the bug to the official developer or the end-user should forward his discovered bug?
An other small example, which is much less important; but I think this belongs to the same "category", the reasoning is much more mysterious to me, since the "patch" clearly cannot break anything here: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10307 This was closed 4 minutes after opening, so I couldnot discuss it (I wanted to revert my last sentence there, this is not true now, I didn't want to lie). Evince developers like that option, and they don't want to change it. (But I don't agree with them here, of course). I simply cannot imagine any reason for "won't fix" (apart from "lazyness" :-P). I'm pretty sure that "implementing" it has _no drawback_, and at least 6 users (from the number of requests) would like it. Again, it is a marginal issue (I put my evince.desktop to NoUpgrade of pacman), but I would like to understand the reason of close.
Bye
I hope, that I didn't hurt anybody, overall I think that AL is still one of best distros around, and I must say a big "thank you" for your work.
Just a link in case you missed it http://phraktured.net/patching-patching-patching.html First reply is mine. Greg