[debian-devel:10274] Re: How should we treat the patches (Re: Debian-JP discussions; lets wrap this up)

[Taketoshi Sano <xlj06203@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Changwoo. Thank you for your opinion.

In <87aer3p0at.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 at 04 Sep 1999 17:07:22 +0900,
 on Re: How should we treat the patches (Re: Debian-JP discussions; lets wrap this up),
  Changwoo Ryu <cwryu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Taketoshi Sano <xlj06203@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
(snip)
> > I think that the forking in upstream is not our responsibility.
> 
> The problem of forking is at the "upstreams" you said.  But, so should
> Debian just reflect the current situation?  I never think so.  Debian
> can be better.

Ah, yes. We can promote and advise to respect upstreams, as I wrote.

> Well, I have maintained a forked version of Texinfo for Korean for
> about two years.  So I know in some cases forking is unavoidable by
> some technical/political reasons.  Forking is not entirely evil.  But
> many (not all) of the Japanese patches have no such a reason.  The
> only reason here is lack of communication.

Sure, in Japan, the cost for communication (telephone lines fee and
networking charge) had been very high for ordinary people, and 
(you can not believe it, but in fact) the oversee e-mails had been
required the extra high fee than domestic e-mails. So, many old Japanese
(or I18N) patches have benn just distributed in Japan, and not contributed
to "upstream". I feel this is not right thing too, but I can not accuse
the elder hackers of laziness for not doing contribution.

> > We can ask or advice the author of these patches to contribute his code
> > into "their" upstreams, but I think we can not order them to contribute
> > his code to our official maintainer for Debian specific purpose.
> 
> We could do ourselves.  I think the Social Contract also covers all of
> improvements, not only Debian-specific ones.

I mean, I can not ORDER the authors outside of Debian, to modify their
patches in order to match only the Debian's needs.

I agree to you, that (I suppose you mean that) We can use the patches
(if it is DFSG compliant) to contribute the original "upstream" with
modifying and extracting the required changes from that patch.

And I hope that current Debian official maintainers do the effort to merge 
the required patches into upstream with us. Because some "upstream" have 
not responded our request to merge. We needs more power. Debian JP Project
has managed to get (only) 60 or so members now, but Debian Project have 
much more people, and have much more power (in resource of human, 
the status in the free software community, and so on).

# I think I have sent the request to merge to the author of xcalendar,
# but since I have no response, I decide to re-send the request.
# I cc:ed that mail some people including you, Changwoo. 
# Please help me to explain the needs of merge. Thanks.

-- 
  Taketoshi Sano: <sano@debian.org>,<sano@debian.or.jp>,<kgh12351@xxxxxxxxxxx>