Jeff, I think your concerns are pretty well real. The problem here though is not that Debian users should not be suggested not to file bugs upstream, the problem is that Debian should not go out of their way to patch stuff around.
Of course this is not entirely Debian’s fault, there are a few projects for which dealing with upstream is a tremendous waste of time of cosmic proportions, as they ignore distributors, think that their needs are totally bogus and stuff like that. Now, not all projects are like that of course. Projects like Amarok are quite friendly with downstream (to the point all the patches that are in Gentoo, added by me at least, were committed at the same time on the SVN), and most of the projects that you can find not suiting any distribution are most likely not knowing what the distributors need.
I did write about this in the past, and you can find my ideas on the “Distribution-friendly Projects” article, published on LWN (part 1, part 2 and part 3). I do suggest the read of that to anybody who has an upstream project, and would like to know what distributors need.
But the problem here is that Debian is known for patching the blood out of a project to adapt it to their needs. Sometimes this is good, as they take a totally distribution-unfriendly package into a decent one, sometimes it’s very bad.
You can find a few good uses of Debian’s patches in Portage, it’s not uncommon for a patched project to be used. On the other hand, you can think of at least two failures that, at least for me, shown the way Debian can easily fail:
- a not-so-commonly known failure in autotoolising metamail, a dependency of hylafax that I tried to run on FreeBSD before. They did use autoconf and automake, but they made them so that they only work under Linux, proving they don’t know autotools that well;
- the EPIC FAIL of the OpenSSL security bug; where people wanted to fix a problem with Valgrind, not knowing valgrind (if you have ever looked at valgrind docs, there is a good reference about suppression files, rather than patching code you don’t understand either).
Now this of course means nothing, of course even in Gentoo there has been good patches and bad patches; I have yet to see an EPIC FAIL like the OpenSSL debacle, but you never know.
The problem lies in the fact that Debian also seem to keep an “holier than thou” attitude toward any kind of collaboration, as you can easily notice in Marco d’Itri’s statements regarding udev rules (see this LWN article). I know a few Debian developers who are really nice guys whom I love to work with (like Reinhard Tartler who packages xine and Russel Coker whose blog I love to follow, for both technical posts and “green” posts; but not limited to), but for other Debian developers to behave like d’Itri is far from unheard of, and actually not uncommon either.
I’m afraid that the good in Debian is being contaminated by people like these, and by the attitude of trusting no one but themselves in every issue. And I’m sorry to see that because Debian was my distribution of choice when I started using Linux seriously.
