Patch Statuses in Launchpad (re-visited)

[Emmet Hikory]

Daniel Holbach wrote:
> In those cases you can still use an empty upstream task to mark the bug
> as "this affects upstream" - of course you need to check manually if it
> was accepted upstream.
<...>
> Reinhard Tartler schrieb:
>> I'd be interested to know how many bugs with patches are affected by
>> these problems though.
>
> Hm? Ask Sébastien how often he asks patch submitters to get their stuff
> upstream first because the patches are just too big to carry them as a
> delta.
>
> I think this is pretty common if you don't deal with "./debian/-only
> patches".

    This is very upstream-specific.  In cases where there are large
active upstream communities (e.g. GNOME, KDE), this may make sense.
For the vast majority of packages, upstream is relatively inactive, or
even if active, unlikely to make a release within the next six months.
 While patches are appreciated, they often do not get review, so much
as belated integration.  There are also a number of packages for which
upstream is unwilling to consider a patch (even for a bug that makes
the package unusable) if it is not submitted against VCS trunk (in
some cases where there has been no release in > 1 year).

    Note that some of this is mitigated by considering Debian
upstream, and working with Debian maintainers to get patches into
Debian, but there are some cases where changes required to prevent
FTBFS in Ubuntu would cause FTBFS in Debian, or similar arrangements,
even outside debian/.  Further, not all Debian maintainers are very
active, and applying a patch in Debian when a maintainer is away can
be very complicated for those not familiar with Debian processes.

-- 
Emmet HIKORY