It involves more social issues than technical issues that relies on
experience, on a per-upstream
basis, which is never something that can be effectively documented.
I've personally encountered upstreams super happy to hear the bits about
inclusion in Debian,
as well as improvement suggestions -- cooperative and friendly upstreams
exist. There are
many good aspects but here I'll mainly discuss the other side.
I've personally also encountered ignorant, or even very hostile
upstreams that immediately
start to attack Debian and its developers once they hear things like
that. Here are some reasons
I observed:
1. Upstream moves at a completely different pace. They may feel bad when
receiving bug reports
from the users about an ancient version provided in Debian stable.
2. Upstream is sensitive on build flags. They may get super confused
when receiving bug reports
that only happens when using Debian's different build flags.
3. Upstream holds an objection on Debian's value behind DFSG. This world
is diverse. There are
people who understand why Debian is so strict on those things. And,
there is surely people
who do not understand and not willing to understand it at all. For
instance, some upstreams may
go mad with the +dfsg source stripping which breaks the intended full
functionality of the
upstream tarball.
4. Upstream disagrees with Debian's technical solution, like binary
package splits.
Speaking of a safer bet, I agree with you that saying nothing is safer,
unless the upstream
is explicitly supportive to that. As permitted by the free software
licenses, you do not need
to notify the upstream whenever you use, study, modify, or redistribute
the software.
On 11/22/24 11:53, Jérémy Lal wrote:
I'm still trying to understand if it's a good idea to contact upstream
authors and tell them their software is being worked on to be included
in Debian, or not.
My own experience has been that most upstream projects don't care
about Debian.
Some do, of course. But many don't.
With my experience, I realized that saying nothing was a safer bet
(sometimes it's really a good idea and most of the time it's not
acknowledged, and a few times it's a bad reception).
but it's somewhat disturbing !
That subtlety in contacting upstream is documented somewhere ?
