[WesolyKubeczek]

But then again, free and open source licenses enable everyone to do any modifications for any purpose whatsoever. That's the whole point. I would like it if the developers quit being patronizing towards people exercising their rights under those licenses. Yes, don't ship it, don't theme my app. We all heard you. Some people choose to not care, and that's okay.

Those same licenses also disclaim any warranty, so the buck stops with whomever applies random patches and takes money for it. In this case, the phone manufacturer shipping OS images. The phone manufacturer can duke it out with Manjaro, of course, and Manjaro folks can tell them to go pound sand and use Debian stable. This is well before upstream should even notice a shadow of kerfuffle happening.

The developers have come up with a multitude of ideas on how to be passive aggressive towards anyone either trying to contribute or submit an issue, stalebot and radio silence being only two of them, so I'm wondering why they just won't apply those techniques this time.

[Etheryte]

This is completely missing the forest for the trees. Just because something is not illegal doesn't mean it's a good idea. When a distro maintainer includes half baked patches for some third party software and the end user then has an issue with it, you can be sure they're gonna reach out to the software maintainers, not to the distro. By the time the back and forth helps everyone figure out that the problem is the version the distro packaged you've created a lot of useless noise and wasted plenty of time.

[simiones]

The problem is something like this: you develop packageA. A user of distroB is installing pacakgeA from distroB latest, and packageA is not working for them. distroB maintainers tell them to go ask packageA about the bug. So, the user comes and bothers packageA about this issue - even though packageA had no intention of distributing this in-progress version to users.

Now, of course, no one here is doing anything illegal. But, everything would be better for everyone if distroB, instead of taking packageA@master had taken packageA@1.0.1 or whatever the latest release is: better working software for distroB users, less support work (bug triage etc) for distroB, less work for packageA maintainers.

Since this is ultimately a social issue, I think an open letter seeking to convince the people involved to think about it and modify their behavior is the best way of going about improving this for everyone. Now, it may well be that the maintainers of distroB have valid reasons not to change their behavior and ignore this letter: all fine. Not saying we should tar and feather them, in any way shape or form. But if this is maybe a fixable problem, why not try to fix it?

[WesolyKubeczek]

If a user comes to me bothering me about some package some distro made of my software, I show the part that says NO WARRANTY and AS IS, and get on with my life.

Also, why should it “bother” anyone at all. You duke it out with whoever brought it to you.

It’s only a problem if you feel a need to please everyone knocking on your doors, which inevitably turns into burnout and you actually behaving harshly towards everyone in the end.

[immibis]

So your response to bug reports is to ignore them and tell the reporter to F off?