Re:Why we never thank open source maintainers
by betaby on Thursday November 23, 2017 @11:31AM
(#15766087)
Some different perspective. Example Debian with plenty of poorly maintained packets which broke original behavior (say linked against another library which is not recommended by upstream) or disable some features or outdated (not in sense of stable/unstable). Sending DD messages 'please fix, thanks' looks like is very reasonable (although some of them do not think so). Either your maintainer or not - even say one can do it 'better', one can't preempt or overload - it's not just fork the whole distro at github.
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Re:Why we never thank open source maintainers
by icebraining on Thursday November 23, 2017 @01:22PM
(#15766868)
Reporting the bug is reasonable. Bugging (no pun intended) them is not.
even say one can do it 'better'
Then offer to take up the maintainer role. Debian has institutions to deal with unresponsive maintainers.
Re:Why we never thank open source maintainers
by Nuzzerino on Thursday November 23, 2017 @02:48PM
(#15767402)
Clearly this is evidence that those institutions are in need of improvement, no? Perhaps too few people know about them, for starters.
Re:Why we never thank open source maintainers
by cstrahan on Thursday November 23, 2017 @04:58PM
(#15768057)
Or go with a distribution that makes it trivial to make drive-by contributions, like NixOS for example. Updating a package is a simple as bumping two lines and sending a pull request here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs
For reference, I’m the (co)maintainer of over 80 packages in Nixpkgs. IIRC, I submitted my first PR within roughly a month of using NixOS. Before NixOS, I had used Ubuntu for 4 years. How many packages did I maintain there? Zero. It’s just too difficult to track down the right project, figure out the arcane build/packaging setup, contact the maintainers, etc.