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