Hi, I’m Gerben from the Netherlands, a software developer in daily life. I’ve been using Ubuntu for several years now; before that, I have used Gentoo and made a few small contributions there, like adding the pngtools package to it. I have also contributed some patches in the past to PDFsharp, an open source library that isn’t usually included in distributions, and submitted one hotfix via IRC to Mediawiki in its earliest years.
Why I’m here now is because I have made a patch for the streamripper package, which fixes a bug when following some redirects. In fact, I also have another patch for it that I haven’t created a report for yet (will do so very soon), fixing a URL parsing bug. I’ve kept both patches as least intrusive as possible and in the style of the existing source.
How do I go about getting these patches the attention they need, and entered into the system? Who can I contact to get this going? Would it be a better idea to submit them to Debian? I would be willing to become maintainer for this package and maybe some other ones in my interest areas, but obviously my contributions will need to be reviewed by someone else. The original upstream package seems to be unmaintained.
Most Ubuntu packages are merged from Debian, preferably with minimal patches.
We generally prefer to upstream patches to Debian when possible so that ALL distros benefit. It’s also a great way for patches to find their way up to the developer.
You can see on the Debian Tracker page that Streamripper needs a bit of love from a volunteer. It uses outdated standards and has some other warnings.
If any volunteer is interested in learning how to maintain packages, apply patches, and help the entire community, mentors.debian.net is a great place to start learning. New volunteers welcome!
If any volunteer is interested in learning how to help upstream bugs and patches from Ubuntu to Debian, the Ubuntu Bug Squad is a good starting point. New volunteers welcome!
