Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal: change to default policy of doing changes to packages that are maintained by other developers

[Kent Fredric <kentnl@gentoo.org>]

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On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 19:37:28 +0200
Piotr Karbowski <slashbeast@gentoo.org> wrote:

> This is a bit unhealthy, especially when some developers that maintain
> packages are out of reach, or the patches to update ebuild just rot on
> the bugzilla and are not taken in by maintainers.

IME this is far from the norm and should not be used as the
justification here.

I would argue some *honest* attempt be made to contact the people
officially responsible for the package.

If they can't be contacted in a reasonable time frame, sure, by all
means.

But I cannot support a policy where it creates a conjecture of "I think
this patch doesn't matter, so I'll just do it".

Because in practice, no change, no matter how apparently insignificant,
is immune from the risk of creating a quality reduction.

And no change, is immune from potentially affecting the package
maintainers workflow. ( For example, if you drop in a sed, or a patch,
when the package uses a carefully curated tar-ball of patches which are
also carefully tested against upstream sources on travis or something,
by dropping the patch in unconsulted, you run the risk of pissing
somebody off by adding a patch in ways that by-passes and potentially
confounds these efforts. )

It really sucks having to review somebodies changes after-the-fact
where you discover the change long after it was done, because nobody
even tried to communicate.

Reasonable attempts should be made, _especially_ if there are multiple
maintainers for a package, or a project with multiple members.

If you don't have the patience to even wait _one_ day for a response,
maybe you shouldn't be doing opensource.

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