Anicka,
I believe that all of us are doing our best in upstreaming our patches. Unfortunately, there are many situations, when it cannot be done - upstream is dead, upstream has another opinion, process takes very long, our patch is SUSE-specific, our patch just workarounds some nasty bug that no one can fix...
Yes, we should upstream as much as possible. But I am pretty sure that even then we will have loads of patches. And I do not think that automatic update that does not work on any of the more important packages is really helpful.
I appreciate your candor in this matter, however I've been on the other end of this attitude in the past. I'm the maintainer of the openslp project. I found out one day several years ago that SuSE had several patches that would have been nice to have in the main code base, but no one bothered to tell me that they even existed. Perhaps it would be good for the community in general to have distro packagers simply contact package maintainers through associated devel mailing lists. A quick note on the list to say that the package has been picked up by a distro, and that patches would be available at a specific location. Then the packager wouldn't be committed to a long-term relationship. The maintainer could check once in a while to see what's out there. John --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org