Or, stick to the policy? [LWN.net]

Or, stick to the policy?

Posted May 5, 2026 16:43 UTC (Tue) by cameron_herbst (guest, #183598)
In reply to: Or, stick to the policy? by Karellen
Parent article: Bug-monitoring expectations and Fedora GNOME packages

I (co-)maintain around 30 packages on Fedora some of which are either included by default on some editions or are very popular.

The problem is not about gnome specifically — it just amplifies it due to the amount of users — but distributions in general. All the bugzillas and issue trackers just add friction. Upstreams never become aware of them and help debug them and package maintainers completely ignore them because they all maintain more than they can chew.

There should be tighter relationships with upstreams and more package maintainers so every package gets the attention it deserves.

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Or, stick to the policy?

Posted May 5, 2026 19:08 UTC (Tue) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

My native bias as a Debian developer is showing here: Debian does a fair job at trying to cooperate with *all* upstreams. It's hard - as a volunteer-led distro with no links to a commercial upstream, the Debian developers and maintainers are busy enough with their own packages: team maintenance is helping here.

In many cases, the Debian folk *are* the upstream for particular packages - it works both ways here. Just demanding that a particular distro should work a certain way is fine if you're also volunteering to contribute time, effort and (perhaps) money and to work with others to make that happen.