[arch-dev-public] Upstream bug closures

[Paul Mattal]

Andreas Radke wrote:
> Am Mon, 9 Nov 2009 19:27:44 +0100
> schrieb Andrea Scarpino <andrea at archlinux.org>:
> 
>> On 09/11/2009, Jan de Groot <jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
>>> I see a lot of bugs getting closed with "Upstream" lately because
>>> they're not packaging bugs. This is not the way to solve bugs. The
>>> only bugs that should be closed upstream are the ones in binary
>>> modules like flashplugin or nvidia binary drivers. Opensource
>>> software can be fixed or debugged, so we should do that instead of
>>> using this bogus closure option.
>> I agree with you here. We should debug or fix software issues (I
>> closed 30 minutes ago an upstream bug about sonata, but I will
>> investigate on that), anyway the recent closed bugs are about kernel
>> and some devices and I do not know how many of us are kernel
>> developers.
>>
> 
> A can't completely agree on that. While it is ok to keep such a bug
> open the debugging and fixing should be done in the upstream
> bugtracker not in our one.
> 
> Our users too often expect the packager (or the one who helped
> out) to solve configuration problems, debug code and fix the bug or do
> the upstream communication. I can't do this and don't want to do this
> for all my packages. It's already hard enough to follow all the mailing
> lists to see major changes and where our packaging is affected.
> 
> I'm not interested to do upstream work where I don't want to. I'm just a
> packager for Arch Linux.

I second Andy's opinion. It's not that I don't want to fix bugs 
upstream, I just disagree that our bugtracker is a place to track them. 
That said, I think it's reasonable for us to try to *report* them 
upstream even if they aren't *fixed* by us.

Perhaps we should agree to:

1) Make sure the bug is reported upstream first and,

2) Put a URL in a comment or the closing message pointing to that bug 
report upstream before closing with 'Upstream'.

- P