Friday, June 10, 2011

DEX


DEX
On his blog, Matt Zimmerman posts a report on DEX, which is a project to get Debian and its derivatives working more closely together. Debian project leader Stefano Zacchiroli had a hand in both the project and the report. It looks like the first project, "ancient-patches", was a success: "This has left only two patches out of the original list of 277. Both of them are filed in the BTS and have been discussed with the relevant maintainer team.One of them is expected to be obsoleted when a new upstream version is packaged, which implements similar functionality. The other is being discussed with the upstream developers, but there is no conclusion yet about whether it can be merged upstream or in Debian."
It's great to see that different distributions are working together, especially since they are so closely related as Debian derivatives are.
However, I'm wondering: Why aren't these patches immediately sent upstream? Wouldn't it be easier for everyone if package maintainers worked closer with upstream maintainers? I'm sure they'd appreciate quality patches. Or am I missing something?

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