On upstream authors

I finally fixed a /tmp handling bug in one of my packages tonight after the upstream author didn't act on the bug report for a few weeks. After talking to Matt Zimmerman about security work a few weeks ago, I decided to look at my packages in detail and found a potential problem. Matt confirmed that it allows an DoS. Nothing terribly serious, but still an important bug that has to be fixed. So I forwarded it upstream, in the hope that upstream would fix it. However, from past experience, my expectation were low. Basically, most of the time I receive a bug report, I have to come up with a patch myself which I then forward upstream. I have no problem contributing to upstream, but after a few years it is getting quite tiresome that I have to fix most bugs myself and that there is almost no upstream development. This entry is not supposed to be a rant, though. Instead, I'd like to thank all the active upstream authors out there, and there are some truly incredible people! A while ago I packaged a new tool and the author is fantastic. Every time I think of a new feature or a user requests something, I mention it to the upstream author who usually mails me a few days later saying that a new upstream release is out. He is really incredible and it's so much fun working with him. In fact, I feel guilty sometimes because I have to do so little work myself, but on the other hand I do make important contributions (I wrote man pages which were integrated upstream, I worked on good integration of the tool with debian-installer, and obviously good integration with Debian itself, etc).