Bug#1086593: Fwd: Bug#1086593: pdftocairo.1: Some remarks and editorial changes for this man page

[Jeremy Bícha]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Jeremy Bícha <jeremy.bicha at canonical.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 4, 2025 at 9:11 PM
Subject: Re: Bug#1086593: pdftocairo.1: Some remarks and editorial
changes for this man page
To: Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig at simnet.is>, <1086593 at bugs.debian.org>


On Wed, Jan 1, 2025 at 2:06 PM Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig at simnet.is> wrote:
>   I do not send e-mails to upstream, if I have to acquire an account.
>
>   Why not forward (valid) bug reports to upstream, as you should already have
> an account there?
>
>   What does Debian policy say?
>
>   If upstream has questions they could use the Debian ticket for that.
>
> N.B.  Upstream should monitor the bug trackers of distributions.

I guess Debian Developers Reference § 3.1.4 applies but it says a
maintainer can ask the bug submitter to do the forwarding work.

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/developers-reference.html#coordination-with-upstream-developers

I have little knowledge or experience with manpages so it would be a
significant amount of work for me to understand and properly evaluate
your patches.

It is my professional opinion that these patches should not be carried
as Debian patches since they do not fix a Debian specific problem nor
do the issues have a significant impact on usability of these packages
for Debian users. Therefore, it is acceptable for a Debian maintainer
to reject these patches.

While I consider the poppler packaging to be adequately maintained,
Debian's bug tracker for poppler is undermaintained as there are many
bugs that need to be triaged and may no longer be relevant to Debian.
As a minimum, I try to do some triage on new bugs like the ones you
reported. It isn't helpful for managing the clutter in the bug tracker
to have open bugs there that I consider to be of minor importance and
that won't be fixed directly in Debian but only fixed in a new
upstream release.

Some upstreams follow Debian bugs but this is rare in my experience.

It appears like fixing manpage warnings, deprecations, etc. is a
passion for you. I encourage you to get an account at
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/ and submit merge requests there. Many
projects are hosted there so it doesn't seem to me to be a waste of
your time to do that. Since improving the manpages is more important
to you than it is to me, I think it is reasonable to ask you to do a
bit more work to see these issues fixed than to expect me to do that
work for you.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha