On 02/26/2010 08:18 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 08:15:43PM +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> 1) to fix a bug or add a feature the maintainer experienced/uses
If nobody is complaining about the bug, then fixing the bug can wait
until the next Fedora release.
Good maintainers fix bugs and update packages _before_ (known) bugs hit
their packages's users and cause damage.
> 2) As already told several times, not having people to test
something
> does not mean that the package is not used
If they're not complaining, they're presumably happy with the current
state of the package?
It could also mean they haven't yet noticed the issues a packages might
be causing, it also could mean they have a local work-around ...
Again, one key to providing good quality packages is "not let bugs hit
your users".
In many cases this means, "pushing upstream updates" because upstream
has fixed some known bugs, Fedora users haven't reported yet.
It would be utterly silly and grossly negligent to demand package
maintainers to only provide updates on "bugs having hit Fedora users".
> 3) It allows new users of the package not to find/debug the bugs
again that
> are already fixed upstream
If they're willing to debug, why are they not willing to test?
Users typically
are interested in seeing "their bugs" fixed and are
testing their use-cases, but are not "testers in general".
I.e. they typically will pickup patches or packages and try them in
their use-cases, but they will not regularily pull the "testing repos".
Ralf