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Exactly. Distro maintainers do not face the same issues that the upstream software developers do. Maintainers only make their job harder.

• account42 5y ago
  > Maintainers only make their job harder. That's unnecessarily harsh. Distro maintainer's primary responsibility is making the Distro as a whole work together and sometimes that means choices that are not optimal for individual programs/libraries on their own. But packaging itself does already reduce the burden on upstream a lot by preempting any build-related support requests from users as well as many compatibility-related ones. Sometimes upstreams interest is also not aligned with the user's interest (e.g. the topic of this thread) and there the distro will tend to choose the user's interests - that's a good thing. As for time bombs specifically, those don't make much sense when the software is installed via a repository that has an update mechanism. Not wanting bug reports for old versions is no excuse for planned obsolence. If you think a distro is increasing your support burden it is quite acceptable to tell users from that distro to use the distro's bug tracker.
  • Dayshine 5y ago
    >If you think a distro is increasing your support burden it is quite acceptable to tell users from that distro to use the distro's bug tracker. Sadly, this is in itself adding a large support burden. I think distributions should be doing a much much much better job of informing their users how they should report issues. tracker.debian.org seems to be almost impossible to find on google for example (If I search i3-wm debian it's not in the first 5 pages!).
    • pabs3 5y ago
      tracker.debian.org is the internal site for Debian contributors, packages.debian.org is the site for Debian users.