Distros Going Their Own Way

Lemme take the opportunity to express my serious dislike about a particular habit in the open source world, frequently seen performed by various distros (and by distro I then mean in the wider sense, not limited to only Linux distros):

They fix problems by patching code in projects they ship/offer, but they don’t discuss the problem upstream and they don’t ship their patch upstream. In fact, in one particular case in a project near to me (make a guess!) I’ve even tried to contact the patch author(s) over the years but they’ve never responded so even though I know of their patch, I can’t get anyone to explain to me why they think they need it…

So hello hey you packagers working on distros! When you get a bug report that clearly is a problem with the particular tool/project and that isn’t really a problem with your particular distro’s way of doing things, please please please forward it upstream or at least involve the actual project team behind the tool in the discussions around the bug and possible solutions. And if you don’t do that, the very least you should do is to make sure the patches you do and apply are forwarded upstream to the project team.

How else are we gonna be able to improve the project if you absorb the bug reports and you keep fixes hidden? That’s not a very open source’ish attitude, methinks.

Recent example that triggered this post.