Bug#578622: mplayer: FTBFS on kfreebsd-amd64 (vidix disable needed)

[Diego Biurrun]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 12:57:33PM +0200, Petr Salinger wrote:
>
>> That was helpful, fixed upstream.
>>
>> I once again reiterate my suggestion to pass problems to upstream first
>> before attempting to work around them locally in the packaging
>> infrastructure of a single distribution.
>
> The expected workflow is a different one. Let the package does not build  
> on a particular architecture. Iff it is detected by porter (me), porter  
> tries to find the cause or provide workaround/fix/hints. They go to 
> Debian BTS, package maintainer evaluates them and integrates into package 
> and forward upstream. In some cases the package maintainer is upstream 
> author or have commit rights into upstream repository, some upstream 
> authors look after bug entries in some distribution.
>
> Please take a look at [1], click on bottom on "Toggle all extra  
> information". There is at about 16000 source packages in Debian. It 
> cannot be managed to comunicate with every of thousands upstreams 
> directly. Moreover the entry in BTS signals for other porters, that the 
> problem is known and its state.

I can understand your position if you are only a porter and not a direct
maintainer of a package.  However, I have seen package maintainers in
different distros duplicate each other's work and add hacks to their
packages that I could have fixed quicker and cleaner if somebody had
shared their problems with me.

I'm just letting you know the upstream position.  We want to hear about
issues and we want the patches.  Everybody's life gets easier if work
gets upstreamed.

Just look how quick we managed to get GNU/kfreebsd building, it was a
matter of hours after we received the reports.  And now that it's
upstream nobody will have extra work maintaining patches again...

Diego