Let good developers like Mozilla to maintenance their packages (Prefix)

[Gianfranco Costamagna]

>Message: 1

>Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 23:38:51 +0800 (GMT+08:00)
>From: Prefix <prefix at pillowsky.org>
>To: ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com
>Subject:  Let good developers like Mozilla to maintenance their
>    packages
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>Let good developers like Mozilla to maintenance their packages!
>
>If we have a look at the maintainers of the packages in the Pool, we will find none of the maintainers are the software developers themselves.
>
>May be the purpose of this strategy is to ensure software quality, because all of the software are tested, modified(if needed), and rebuild by the Ubuntu Community.
>
>But, as for good developers like Mozilla, they have the ability to ensure the quality. I think it's not a good idea to assume that their softwares have bugs and need to be fixed by the Ubuntu Community. We are cooperated to bring the world a good OS, so we work on different fields and trust each other.
>
>What is more important is that, they know a lot more about their code than us. If a large project like Firefox contain bugs in their code and can't work well in Ubuntu, we have to waste a lot of time to learn the code tree, learn the algorithm in the program and finally find where the bug is, and fix it. But the Mozilla developers are familiar with the code and is possible to fix it within five minutes!This will happen if only Mozilla maintenance Firefox packages themselves, because they will develop on Ubuntu, build on Ubuntu, test on Ubuntu. Bugs will become less and less, and less time will be wasted on things just like reinventing the wheel!
>
>The new strategy has many additional good points:
>Let the software provider maintenance packages themselves can encourage them to pay more attention to Ubuntu, make the software more fit with Ubuntu.
>Always have 0-day support for new release. That's obvious!
>Software developers will officially support Ubuntu, and may recommand users to choice Ubuntu.
>
>I think a lot of good developers have the ability to maintenance packages themselves. Mozilla, LibreOffice, Gnome, Apache, php, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, Filezilla, Boinc, WordPress, etc. They contribute a lot and make excellent software, and we should trust them.
>

I can talk only for Boinc, since I'm directly involved in it in debian and ubuntu (from autosync).
I tried many times to report to upstream, we are in a very strict contact, and many times they fixed the problem (I backported sometimes patches).
But many and many times I personally fix the issues, and I report the fix upstream.
I'm not (yet) an upstream developer, but I think I have a good knowledge for fixing bugs in boinc package.

And last, upstream isn't aware (AFAIK) of the debian packaging system, it will introduce a useless overhead in boinc handling.

They release once or twice a year, maybe the improvements will come if they adopt on their machine the debian packages, this is why we are going to package the boinc-server-maker package too.


Gianfranco

>It is in urgent need to accept the new strategy because many software like LibreOffice are not update in time. This shows we do not have enough staff to maintenance the packages. So it is time to change!
>
>====================
>Original arcitlce Link: http://blog.pillowsky.org
>I am a student in zhejiang University, China.
>May be my English is not so well