Do you monitor your Python packages in inux distributions?

[Irmen de Jong]

On 12-3-2011 20:26, skip at pobox.com wrote:
>
> I'm one of the SpamBayes developers and in a half-assed way try to keep
> track of SB dribbles on the net via a saved Google search.  About a month
> ago I got a hit on an Ubuntu bug tracker about a SpamBayes bug.  As it turns
> out, Ubuntu distributes an outdated (read: no longer maintained) version of
> SpamBayes.  The bug had been fixed over three years ago in the current
> version.  Had I known this I could probably have saved them some trouble, at
> least by suggesting that they upgrade.
>
> I have a question for you people who develop and maintain Python-based
> packages.  How closely, if at all, do you monitor the bug trackers of Linux
> distributions (or Linux-like packaging systems like MacPorts) for activity
> related to your packages?  How do you encourage such projects to push bug
> reports and/or fixes upstream to you?  What tools are out there to discover
> which Linux distributions have SpamBayes packages?  (I know about
> rpmfind.net, but there must be other similar sites by now.)

Hello Skip.
I'm the author of Pyro and had something similar happening a while ago.
Ubuntu being the distribution in case, and they decided to upgrade their package to the 
still-not-stable version 4 of Pyro. But version 4 is incompatible with Pyro3. 
Predictably, soon afterwards, complaints and bug reports started to appear.

I wasn't aware of all this until I was contacted by a Debian (or Ubuntu, but it doesn't 
really matter) user directly to alert me to the problem. I *did* know that Debian and 
Ubuntu have been including Pyro as a package for quite a while, but I'm not following 
their activity much.

(Via the package 'homepage' I contacted the package maintainer and things have been 
sorted out.)

I tend to glance on the deb package 'homepage' once in a while (few months) to see if 
something interesting pops up in their tracker and such, but I'm doing that randomly.
Also I'm not actively encouraging anybody to push tracker issues upstream to me. I'm not 
spending much time on Pyro, and it seems people know how to find me anyway. What distros 
decide to do with it is their business, I'm just hoping the package maintainer is smart 
enough to know what to do with the issues reported on their trackers (if any).

Besides Debian and Ubuntu I'm not aware of any other distro that includes a Pyro 
package. I found out about Debian/Ubuntu by googling.

All in all probably not a very helpful example but I thought I'd share my experience.

Cheers
Irmen de Jong