I wasn't trying to suggest I thought OBS was in the wrong here, to be clear, just that the debate between maintainers and developers, and not wanting to get bugs for things that were external, reminded me of that exchange.
There's plenty of other examples, of course - one that springs to mind was when Ubuntu shipped a patch of their own design in OpenZFS that caused data loss, and it got reported to upstream.
To be fair, not necessarily singling out your comment: I've seen mixed sentiment around the net. I think the characterization of the threats as being "legal threats" makes people more prone to see this as the OBS project being vexatious, but it seems like it's more a last resort to get Fedora to even pay attention.
And credit to Fedora, it looks like they're working quickly to fix the problem now. It's pretty obvious it wasn't malice that led them to not respond quickly.
If you read the actual bug thread with the back and forth, they weren't to the point the fedora contact was pretty hostile about their use of a slightly old QT version and was adamant about keeping it in place. The fixes only happened within hours after the trademark/copyright request presumably because that went to legal and legal WTF'd at the whole situation and their maintainer's handling of the situation and magically it got fixed almost immediately thereafter.
I’m a Fedora packager (not for this package). Like many others I have an unrelated day job.
If there’s an upstream complaint I might get to it this weekend, maybe next. If I’m busy for a few weeks that doesn’t make me stupid.
Have had my share of “discussions” with upstream who want the latest version packaged when this might not be completely in line with our guidelines. Not an uncommon issue.
Yeah it’s not fair to expect volunteers to show up on weekdays, I agree with you.
But equally, I don’t think it’s fair that packagers want to have it both ways. Packagers want to make subtle, possibly breaking changes to software they didn’t author. The end users feel the pain and complain to the author. The author has no control over the situation, and they’re feeling the pain during the working week.
So the packager has been instrumental in creating the problem with the patch, and when requested to do something about it, turns around and says “buddy I do this for free, I’ll get to it over the weekend, maybe.” Sure, but the author is feeling the pain right now.
Again, it’s nice that you’re volunteering your time for others. But it would be good if you acknowledged that the costs of packaging aren’t borne entirely by packagers. Authors bear part of the cost when they get blamed for broken software.
Sometimes changes are required to meet packaging guidelines, sometimes you can get exemptions. Of course users often don’t realise who’s done what.
I suppose my advice to upstream would be to direct the end user to the Fedora bug tracker, where the bug can land in my queue. Or advise the user to install from a different source.
The upstream that I’ve dealt with have been kind enough to lodge a bug themselves on the package I look after, which is also an option, and much appreciated.
> I suppose my advice to upstream would be to direct the end user to the Fedora bug tracker, where the bug can land in my queue. Or advise the user to install from a different source.
How is upstream supposed to make this happen when distro maintainers not only don't mark the package as modified by them, but also silently change the flatpak configuration so that installing packages from flatpak in the way that would normally install a clean upstream build doesn't do so?
There's plenty of other examples, of course - one that springs to mind was when Ubuntu shipped a patch of their own design in OpenZFS that caused data loss, and it got reported to upstream.