Upstream patch notifications

[Timo Sirainen]

Hi,

In recent years I've been several times annoyed at patches that Dovecot package maintainers add to their specific Linux distributions. Initially I waste a lot of time until I figure out that some user-reported problem isn't in Dovecot itself, but something that package maintainer changed. After that it becomes easier to remember that a specific distro had a specific problem, but it's still a waste of time for everyone to even have to deal with it.

For example just recently one guy disabled imap/pop3 port in default config for no good reason (reverted since). Ubuntu itself caused a lot of user confusion for a long time by using a separate dovecot-postfix.conf config file for ..whatever the package name was called (newer Dovecot versions will log a warning about config path changes, trying to avoid the worst of this problem in future).

So, my question: Is there a possibility for me to get an email about each patch that goes to any of Dovecot related packages, immediately after it gets placed into some kind of testing repository? So that if I notice a potential problem, I could contact you and get it solved before the final release?

I don't know about other upstream coders, but I'd prefer there to be more cooperation. Like, just an example idea: Have upstream-PACKAGE at list.ubuntu.com mailing list where all notifications about diffs to upstream PACKAGE gets sent. Whoever is interested in them can subscribe there. And send an email about the existence of such list to all of the upstreams' mailing lists. Perhaps the Debian's big openssl mistake would have been noticed immediately if such list had existed for them.. I guess it would be even better to have common lists shared by all distros, but maybe that's too much to ask for.