On Mar 12, 2011, at 2:26 PM, s...@pobox.com wrote: > > I'm one of the SpamBayes developers and in a half-assed way try to keep > track of SB dribbles on the net via a saved Google search. About a month > ago I got a hit on an Ubuntu bug tracker about a SpamBayes bug. As it turns > out, Ubuntu distributes an outdated (read: no longer maintained) version of > SpamBayes. The bug had been fixed over three years ago in the current > version. Had I known this I could probably have saved them some trouble, at > least by suggesting that they upgrade. > > I have a question for you people who develop and maintain Python-based > packages. How closely, if at all, do you monitor the bug trackers of Linux > distributions (or Linux-like packaging systems like MacPorts) for activity > related to your packages? How do you encourage such projects to push bug > reports and/or fixes upstream to you? What tools are out there to discover > which Linux distributions have SpamBayes packages? (I know about > rpmfind.net, but there must be other similar sites by now.)
Hi Skip, I use google alerts to track where my packages posix_ipc and sysv_ipc get mentioned, and they have been turned into packages for Fedora and I think one other distro the name of which escapes me at the moment. At first I was really pleased to see them made into distro-specific packages because I'm too lazy to do it myself. But then I realized the same side effect that you described -- the versions distributed via my Web site have moved on and added bug fixes and major features like Python 3 support, while the distro-specific packages are frozen in time. I guess via my Google alerts I would learn if a bug was filed against one of my outdated packages. I only get 1-2 alerts per day, so they're easy to keep track of. If my packages were more popular, I might get so many alerts I'd just stop reading them. So far I've never seen a distro-specific bug reported against one of my packages. All bugs have been reported directly to me. I hope that continues to be the case because I don't have a good solution to the problems you mentioned. Cheers Philip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
