How to not collaborate with Debian (and upstream)

[Steven Harms]

This sounds more like 'How not to encourage anyone to help at all'.
The tone of the comments
in the bug are very confrontational when clearly all these people
wanted was a functional
package.

They saw a package that didn't work for *anyone* and wanted to change
it.  They were not
seasoned pro's, and I think this is just a testimate to the lack of a
obvious process.

It would be a shame, on the heels of developer week, to lambaste new
contributors on
mailing lists.


On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 8:02 PM, Lucas Nussbaum
<lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net> wrote:
> * If the Debian package uses a patch system, change the patch system.
>  You get bonus points if you switch from dpatch to anything else,
>  and rename all the patches during the process, since this increases
>  the diff size significantly.
>
> * Upstream doesn't release often enough? And marking an svn snapshot
>  as such in the upstream version doesn't look good? Don't hesitate to
>  make up a new upstream release (or an RC). Doesn't matter if it only
>  exists in Ubuntu.
>
> * You want to fix an upstream bug? Fix it in a way that is
>  completely Debian/Ubuntu-specific (using tools like
>  update-alternatives, for example). That way, upstream won't be able
>  to steal your patch, and users of this software will have to switch
>  to Ubuntu if they want your new feature.
>
> * If the software is dual-licensed, license your patches under only
>  one of the licenses, to make it even less likely that upstream will
>  integrate them.
>
> * When writing the changelog, make sure to forget about some changes, to
>  make it less likely that the Debian maintainer will cherry-pick some
>  interesting changes.
>
> * And of course, never contact the Debian maintainer during the whole
>  process, even if you find bugs in the Debian package.
>
> Many thanks to Neil Wilson and Mathias Gug for preparing and uploading
> libgems-ruby 1.3.0~RC1-0ubuntu1, ignoring my concerns raised in
> LP#145267. This package provides perfect examples for each of the
> above points. Nice slap in the face.
> --
> | Lucas Nussbaum
> | lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
> | jabber: lucas at nussbaum.fr             GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
>
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