Glen Pfeiffer wrote: > Is it preferable to submit a bug report to Debian or to the > upstream project? Assume it is not a Debian only package, like > GNOME for example.
This is a judgement call on your part. If you have good detail about the problem and are confident that it is actually an upstream bug then by all means report it upstream. If you can provide a patch for it against upstream sources then all the better and the more likely it will be to be fixed sooner. For example I use 'mutt' and of course it is mutt from Debian. I find a problem. I grab the latest upstream mutt sources, preferably from the latest version control, and build and test it. I verify that the problem exists in the upstream sources. I report it upstream. After working through the problem with upstream I also report it as a Debian bug so that it is in the knowledge database there. When the upstream version becomes released in Debian the changelog can reflect the closure of that bug. It is a great system. If you don't know and don't have the time and resources to determine the problem at a detail level enough to know if it is upstream or downstream then report it to the downstream packager only. By design the packager should know more about the project than you do and should be able to spend the time to sort out the bug reports. But this is a huge time drain and anything you can do to help the package maintainer is a good thing. (Volunteering time walking through the defect tracker and verifying, updating, managing bugs is almost always appreciated.) But reporting bugs introduced by 3rd party patches is frequently annoying. For example, often users running SELinux will frequently have policy layer problems and will report bugs to an upstream. But the upstream does not use SELinux and so the bug is in the patches applied. The bug should go to the 3rd party vendor that added those patches. There are many examples where 3rd party changes have diverged the behavior from the upstream. This can give a distribution a bad reputation with the upstream if patches are often the source of problems. Debian generally keeps fairly close to the upstream but this varies from package maintainer to package maintainer. Better to work problems out with the package maintainer first in those cases. Another reason to report bugs to the Debian package is if the version in the upstream is much later than the version in the software distribution. For example Debian Stable by design will be stable and will not change until the next release. This design brings huge benefits to users of Debian Stable. Stable is not the bleeding edge. Stable is stable! But it is also a point of contention with some upstreams (e.g. Mozilla) and upstream will denigrate a distribution with a stable release when the upstream does not believe in stable releases. When the upstream only believes that everyone should use the beeding edge it is best to report bugs to the package maintainer. In the end you should use your best judgement. Think about the overall problem and try to do the best thing. Bob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
