Hello James,
This is a really late answer but I was sick on Saturday and decided to let the
computer switched off on Sunday...
On Sat, May 29, 1999 at 09:58:59PM +0100, James Troup wrote:
First of all: I am sorry for my previous mails on this thread. I really
sounded like an idiot in those mails.
> Blah. This really sucks.
>
> a) It was way less than 3 months ago.
This is probably the case. I am sorry but I do not have irclogs... I have to
apologize - I did not want to accuse you of anything. And I can fully
understand that maintainers do not always have the time to do new uploads.
I just had the feeling our talk on irc was in the distant past. And as I was
looking into the BTS if someone had my problem before I also looked if you
applied my patch. After that I wrote the original mail and named that patch as
an example.
Also the patch I made to mawk is not of a big importance. In fact I do not
think that anybody was bitten by that bug in practice.
> b) I said I would look at it _last_ week, as that was the first week
> I'd had off from work in 6 months. As it turned out, my holiday
> became this week for various reasons. And I have looked at the
> patch this week.
>
> c) I said I don't just apply patches, *whoever* they come from, I have
> to understand them first.
This is how everybody should handle this. I even check the patches the
upstream maintainer made (if it is not too much).
> Look, I'm _sorry_ I haven't applied your patch, but I have very little
> free time, and I have to prioritise it as I see fit. Personally, I
> think new-maintainer, ftpmaster and keyring-maint are _all_ higher
> priority than a patch for a bug which affects very few people.
I have to be sorry. After reading my mails again I think they were badly
worded. It sounds as if I would be annoyed because my patch did not make it
into the package yet. This is not the case.
You do not need to make any apologies. You are doing a great job for
new-maintainer and as the maintainer of the keyrings. I did not know you are
also one of our ftpmaster. How do you handle all this load?
> I also think there is a serious attitude problem here. Why is it so
> important that the patch is applied? The point is you've _done the
> work_. It's available now in the BTS for me, Chris, or some future
> maintainer of mawk. If you're going to get in a huff every time a
> maintainer is slow in applying a patch or responding, you might as
> well give up now.
The point I wanted to make is that it would be good to have packages including
the qa patches available for everybody. Personally I do not care if a new
package is available. If I find a problem I look into the BTS if somebody
encountered the same and read the logs. If there is a patch I do not have any
problem building a new package for myself. But there are "normal" users which
are unable to do just that. And as I testbuild the patch anyway I would like
to put the binary somewhere.
I guess the most simple solution is just putting the package on www.debian.org
and a link into the mail to the BTS. If I only had this idea before making
that much noise...
> In any event, I can tell you one thing that _won't_ make me hurry to
> apply your patch, and that's bitching about me on a mailing list I may
> or may not read and misrepresenting (to put it lightly) what I said to
> you.
You are right. It was a bad idea to refer to my patch to mawk in my first
mail. I just wanted to show an example. But I failed as this is not a real
example. Nobody using Debian really needs this patch.
Hopefully I did the semantics right in this mail. Sorry for wasting your time
James...
cu
Torsten (who will learn from this)
