After GHM [1], I've head a lengthy discussion with Steve White (Cc:-ed, GNU maintainer [upstream]) about Debian's procedures for forwarding bugs upstream.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2011/09/msg00004.html The conversion touched the usual suspects: - Debian is committed to forward bugs upstream - that should happen in a timely manner but only after triaging (otherwise many upstream will get upset for non relevant reports) - due to manpower issue that does not always happen (timely) and some upstream might get upset about that - PTS subscriptions mitigate the problem, but only for upstreams willing to withstand the load of all untriaged Debian bugs (that might be significant and prone to many false positives for popular software) A tentative bottom line of the discussion is that: - we are not always doing our part in forwarding bugs upstream (of course: we try hard, but we can surely do better) and there will always be corner cases (e.g. MIA maintainers, orphaned packages, etc.) - we do offer mechanisms that upstream could use to mitigate the problem, but they have significant drawbacks Steve suggested a feature that might improve the status quo: - enable people to subscribe to bug traffic only if it matches specific tags (the idea being of forwarding upstream only the traffic for "confirmed" bugs) - add a DELAYED-like mechanism where upstream is notified of a bug only if the package maintainer fails to "deal with" the bug in a specific timeframe, say, 10 days ("deal with" may be defined in various ways, e.g.: "post to the bug log", "closes the bug", details need to be fleshed out a bit on this point) Both features will most likely end up being proper feature requests against the BTS and/or the PTS. They look completely non-intrusive with respect to what we already offer and they will be opt-in anyhow. The DELAYED part is not entirely trivial to implement, but Steve is interested in helping out. The main reason why I'm posting here is to gather feedback about the idea, in particular from people willing to try guessing whether their respective upstreams could benefit from something similar or not. Many thanks to Steve for the interesting discussion! Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o . Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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