On Thu, Sep 15, 2022 at 06:17:02PM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote: > To put it in the most brief terms, I come to that conclusion based on what > many people are telling me: Debian maintainers cannot fix bugs in software > because they are just volunteers. That statement is incorrect. People _can_ and _do_ fix a lot of bugs when they have time. There are a lot of DDs/DMs/contributors fixing a lot of bugs on a daily basis for that matter. You could consider taking a look at -devel-changes ML if you'd like to. > That explains why I almost always am at > least annoyed by one or two bugs when running Debian software, and sometimes > after an update the computer is totally unusable until I can debug it and find > the fix, because volunteers don't have the time to do it for me. That is what > most everyone on debian-user is telling me. Do you disagree with what they > say? Well, sometimes bugs do sit around for a bit, yes; but you are presenting it in a much way that it makes the situation look worse than it actually is. The resolution is quick quite a few times (to my experience and I am a DD myself) but yes, sometimes they do sit around for a while. In that case, it is nice to file good bug reports (as Andy told you) and if you have a patch, that's even better. You could consider to ping maintainers after a week or so if you think it is important. And if you think something very critical is broken, you could even raise the severity of the bug, I don't see a lot of problem with it. And yes, sometimes the maintainers of a package _can_ be AFK too, this is volunteer work after all. Someone might be on a vacation, or in a conference, or travelling, or busy with RL and seeing your BR on an immediate basis isn't a possibility. > Also, in my experience, these bugs and catastrophic failures caused by updates > of a supposedly stable release happened *much* less often when I used software > that is written by paid developers. Fine, but what do you propose to do here? Pay all DDs for fixing bugs? Who will manage the finances/funding? What if a bug report is critical and someone is unwilling to pay for a fix? What if someone needs a break for whatever reason? -- have you considered to give a thought about these? Also, I'd like to say that calling out Debian contributors with "Hey, you are doing a horrible job" is a negative thing for us to hear as well. You said that you got a few negative replies, which you are annoyed with, this goes both ways, really. -- Best, Nilesh
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