I’m a Fedora packager (not for this package). Like many others I have an unrelated day job.
If there’s an upstream complaint I might get to it this weekend, maybe next. If I’m busy for a few weeks that doesn’t make me stupid.
Have had my share of “discussions” with upstream who want the latest version packaged when this might not be completely in line with our guidelines. Not an uncommon issue.
But equally, I don’t think it’s fair that packagers want to have it both ways. Packagers want to make subtle, possibly breaking changes to software they didn’t author. The end users feel the pain and complain to the author. The author has no control over the situation, and they’re feeling the pain during the working week.
So the packager has been instrumental in creating the problem with the patch, and when requested to do something about it, turns around and says “buddy I do this for free, I’ll get to it over the weekend, maybe.” Sure, but the author is feeling the pain right now.
Again, it’s nice that you’re volunteering your time for others. But it would be good if you acknowledged that the costs of packaging aren’t borne entirely by packagers. Authors bear part of the cost when they get blamed for broken software.
I suppose my advice to upstream would be to direct the end user to the Fedora bug tracker, where the bug can land in my queue. Or advise the user to install from a different source.
The upstream that I’ve dealt with have been kind enough to lodge a bug themselves on the package I look after, which is also an option, and much appreciated.
How is upstream supposed to make this happen when distro maintainers not only don't mark the package as modified by them, but also silently change the flatpak configuration so that installing packages from flatpak in the way that would normally install a clean upstream build doesn't do so?
Less of a poor faith comment, more like a badly landed gag. In my head, everybody would have known I was riffing off:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor