[arch-general] Upstream bugs, patches

[Xavier]

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.

> If the answer no, do packagers forward the bug to the official developer
> or the end-user should forward his discovered bug?
> 

You should probably look yourself on the upstream bug tracker to know 
what is going on.

> 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.
> 

Again, make sure that upstream is aware of this : that many users 
consider this was a bad move, and that many other distro have to patch 
it (specifying which exact distro and providing proof / links to source 
packages if possible).

But as you stated, this was also easy for you to fix this manually, so 
again, no big troubles here.