> What would you prefer? Upstream balancing five bug reports in
five
> downstream bug trackers (plus his own) and wasting ton of time just
> coordinating and communicating with them, or five bug reporters
> (and
> their package maintainers, if required) working with the upstream
> in
> the upstream bug tracker?
>
> I understand that it is not possible always (given the character of
> the component in question, or because bug reporters are not able to
> work with the upstream code, and of course it could genuinely be a
> packaging bug or bug caused by other components in the distro), but
> when it is possible, I think it should be preferred.
-1.
The Fedora maintainers are supposed to bring the upstream to the
distribution and maintain it there. The Fedora users are supposed
to use the distribution, not compile the upstream themselves. It's
the Fedora maintainer that should do the communication with the
upstream (they have accounts in the upstream bug tracking systems).
And it's the Fedora maintainers that should release erratas, fixing
the distribution for users of said distribution.
In my opinion this should be a maintainer choice. Ideally there would be a support for
this choice in Bugzilla. When reporting a new bug against component X, "bug reporting
guidelines" would be displayed (Launchpad already supports this). The guidelines can
say "Please report all your bugs here" (or be empty), or they can also say
"If you bug looks like this, it is a probably packaging bug, report it here. If you
bug looks like that, it is possibly an upstream bug, please report it at URL".
Why this should be a maintainer choice? Because it is his time and energy investment.
Speaking for myself, I would be willing to package and maintain some great packages for
Fedora, but only if I don't have to do a "full support", but just
"packaging support". I don't have time nor knowledge for full-fledged
support for various projects. So here's the choice - either we give the decision to
maintainers and we might have a lot of software packaged in Fedora, or we force them to do
full support, and we will have just the most common software in Fedora (but
"perfectly" supported </irony>).
Also please note that "half support" is not the definitive state of the package,
any time a skilled project enthusiast might appear, co-maintain the project and raise the
support level from "half" to "full".