[arch-general] Upstream bugs, patches

Grigorios Bouzakis grbzks at gmail.com
Thu May 1 17:10:01 EDT 2008


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




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