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JuanKB1024
Asked: 2018-11-09 11:54:25 +0800 CST

How to notify a package maintainer about upstream updates?

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I am running a pacemaker, pcs, corosync and I've just found that the current ubuntu package "fence_agents" is not as updated as the upstream source by various versions.

Specifically, I'm having problems with "fence_vbox" which the latest version works when the host OS is MacOSX where as the current version in the bionic repository does not (I built it from source to test and the OSX problem was fixed).

According to these other posts Question1 Question2 I should inform the package maintainer of the updates. So my question is, How do I identify and inform said maintainers?

package-management packaging apt cluster

2 Answers

  1. Try the command apt show fence-agents, which will output some information about the package. For example on 16.04 this returns (emphasis mine):

    Package: fence-agents
Version: 4.0.22-2
Priority: optional
Section: universe/admin
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>
Original-Maintainer: Debian HA Maintainers <[email protected]>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 592 kB
Depends: perl, python:any, libc6 (>= 2.15), python-pycurl, python-pexpect
Recommends: libnet-telnet-perl, openssh-client, sg3-utils, snmp
Suggests: python-requests, python-suds
Conflicts: cman (<= 3.0.12-2ubuntu4)
Replaces: cman (<= 3.0.12-2ubuntu4)
Homepage: https://fedorahosted.org/cluster/wiki/HomePage
Download-Size: 169 kB
APT-Sources: http://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
Description: Fence Agents for Red Hat Cluster
 Red Hat Fence Agents is a collection of scripts to handle remote
 power management for several devices.  They allow failed or
 unreachable nodes to be forcibly restarted and removed from the
 cluster.

    You see that this package metadata contains names and email addresses of the Maintainer for Ubuntu and the Original-Maintainer, as well as a link for reporting Bugs (in this case the generic Launchpad link) as well as a specific project Homepage. This information should be a good start to get in contact with the responsible people or teams.

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  2. Best Answer

    Generally, you don't need to notify maintainers of new upstream versions. Long ago, Debian built automated tools to do that.

    Example for fence-tools: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fence-agents . This page also shows which upstream version is packaged for Debian, and when.

    Ubuntu syncs from Debian unstable twice yearly, so Ubuntu 19.04 will soon update to fence-agents 4.3.1-1.

    Older releases of Ubuntu will NOT normally receive the newer version. However, if an older version suffers from a serious regression or bug, there is a way to ask for a backport of a newer version that fixes the bug.

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