Busy work

[Chris Coulson]

On Fri, 2011-02-04 at 10:22 -0800, Akkana Peck wrote:

> > it's 30s of editing. Arguably, my bad for not providing
> > a patch; but again, I thought that would be a waste of time, because
> > it would take longer for me to produce a patch, be sure that it was
> > clean, and applied to the latest version of the package, and then for
> > the developer to apply it, than for the developer simply to edit the
> > man page themselves and produce a package patch.
> 
> Including a patch often doesn't help anyway. That just leads to "can
> you make a debdiff rather than a patch?" Make a debdiff, and it turns
> out you should have made a PPA.  Make a PPA, and there are further steps.
> 
> After a while you realize it's a lot less work to maintain your
> own copy of the package source locally than to keep trying to find
> the magic steps to get the fix into Ubuntu.


I don't really consider a debdiff to be a necessary requirement for
sponsoring a bug, especially if it is just dropping in a patch touching
upstream code. What matters is that the patch is correct and of the
required quality. It's not difficult for sponsors to create a package
using a patch that a contributor has attached to a bug report (after
all, the extra work is normally just creating a changelog entry, which
isn't particularly hard).

I hope your experience isn't the norm. If we are driving away
contributors and turning away good patches because somebody hasn't
provided a debdiff, then this makes me both sad and angry.

Regards
Chris
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