Hi Manphiz, When I was reviewing your work I noticed that you appear to have been unable to rebase a patch from 1.25.1 onto 1.27.0. This should take less than five minutes with ediff (gbp pq workflow), and there have been several discussions both on upstream's tracker and privately about how the info in that patch is needed. We have many years of good rapport with upstream, and this patch was part of that understanding and collaboration. I'd be happy to fix up the patch header to be more informative, and I concede that I missed this important step when I orphaned the package. Regards, Nicholas
Nicholas D Steeves <sten@debian.org> writes: The patch only touches README.md, so I fail to see it as "a bug which has a major effect on the usability of a package". Changed to minor. Do you have any reference to the discussions? I saw it marked as "Forwarded: not-needed" and the changes seem to be Debian specific, which seems possible that upstream may not be aware of it. Adding links to the discussions would help. Also, this is still a team maintained package, so feel free to make changes as you see fit.
Xiyue Deng <manphiz@gmail.com> writes: Right, that's in the subject of this bug. Is your bias that our users don't read README.md, and/or that documentation isn't important? When users follow the installation instructions in the documentation and it renders the package unusable or breaks non-related packages, then it's more severe than "minor". This has happened disproportionately often with this package compared to others. "Minor" also means trivial to fix, which begs that question: why did you create a problem that would have been trivial to avoid? If in doubt, you should ask your teammates. Help with what? The old patch addresses the issues raised both upstream and in private. As the maintainer of this package, you are now responsible to our users, and to upstream. Also, in my checklist of your competencies, you're still missing a couple of categories. Being able to do a three-way merge (I recommend ediff) and maintain a patch is one of them. Maintaining good relations with users and upstreams are two others. Best, Nicholas
Nicholas, You could offer your feedback using a much more constructive tone than the one you took in this message. This, in particular, was not a nice thing to say at all. Clearly Xiyue is capable of doing those things. But more importantly, just telling someone they don't have certain capacities can only have negative outcomes. Instead, tell them how you think they could do better.
Nicholas D Steeves <sten@debian.org> writes: I'm following the bug severity level suggestions[1]. The patch only touches documents without any code change, which I think fits the category of "minor": a problem which doesn't affect the package's usefulness, and is presumably trivial to fix. Also, I see that you changed the severity to "normal", so I think you agree it's not "important". I found your arguments vague and exaggerating without any reference. Let's first make sure we are discussing the patch I dropped in commit[2]. The patch mainly does 2 things: replaces upstream instruction to install through ELPA with Debian instructions (with a suggest prefer version in sid); and a new instruction to report bug in the Debian way. I have no concern with the second change. By the first change, Are you suggesting that installing php-mode through ELPA breaks users in anyway? In my experience, installing addons both from ELPA and Debian work fine, even if there were dependency relationships. Also suggesting using sid on stable Debian systems creates FrankenDebian, which I believe a senior DD like you know is a bad thing. If a newer upstream version fixes any issues, and the newer version will not be backported to the stable distribution, the better way is to install the newer version through ELPA, instead of configuring a FrankenDebian. The is also an important reason I didn't try to rebase the patch. And where is the link referencing the discussion? OK. Adding a link to the upstream issue you mentioned would help me and other maintainers understand your concern better. The maintainer is the Emacsen team, but yes, I do have responsibilities as you mentioned, with help from other team members. You assume that I dropped the patch because I didn't know how to do a 3-way merge. I gave my reason above. [1] https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities [2] https://salsa.debian.org/emacsen-team/php-elisp/-/commit/08630e52c7ee41c022522543d127af42d3afe5c2