Request for an open dialog between projects

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 09:10:34PM +0200, Benjamin Drung wrote:
>Am Montag, den 28.03.2011, 10:15 -0700 schrieb info at bandshed.net:
>> The point of all this background is to pose a question about 
>> maintaining pkg-multimedia packages in AV Linux. My custom packages 
>> in AV Linux all have an 'avlinux' suffix appended to them to 
>> differentiate them from your packages, these packages of course I 
>> maintain myself. When users have an issue with one of your packages I 
>> find it a little 'politically' awkward to handle. I would very much 
>> like an open dialog with pkg-multimedia so we can have a good working 
>> relationship and I would like to be able to openly send users and bug 
>> reports that pertain to you without masking the true origin of where 
>> these reports are coming from. Although I am an arms length project 
>> that may politically differ from Debian ideals I think we have far 
>> more in common than these minor differences.
>
>Here's my opinion: Send users to us if they experience a packaging bug 
>or to the (original) upstream developers if it is an upstream bug. For 
>small package, you can forward all bug reporters to us. For big 
>packages, there's the risk to collect too many bugs without having the 
>manpower to process and forward them all.

I am of a different opinion:

Generally I encourage all users of Debian to file bugreports at Debian.  
Just make sure to mention anything unusual about the installed system.

Since you use Debian as basis for your distro, you and all your users 
are also Debian users.

But since you "infect" your Debian installation with custom parts, 
please make sure to mention that when filing bugreports, to make it 
easier for package maintainers to take that into account (and to help 
those package maintainers feeling differently than me to easily ban such 
bugreports).


Regards,

  - Jonas

P.S. Same goes for Ubuntu and other distros derived from Debian.  Having 
said that, I must add that specifically Ubuntu I personally am quite 
sceptical getting bugreports from, due to my experience with that 
distribution quite heavily distorting core parts of their system 
compared to Debian.  But the principle of them being users of Debian 
remain.

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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