Re: Test Alternative initialize scheme

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Nikolay Kudryavtsev <nikolay.kudryavtsev@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2018 15:38:51 +0300
> 
> While I agree about the lack of upstream communication, I don't see the 
> situation changing any time soon, nor them dying. One reason is 
> (understandably) slow pace of upstream development

Upstream development is not slow: just look at the number of commits
per months or even per week.  Many bugs get fixed within days if not
hours of them being reported.

What is slow is the rate of releasing official versions.  Whether that
matters to many users, I don't know, what with quite a few following
the development branch.

> for kit devs it's often much easier to provide a patch downstream,
> since upstream fix may not be coming until one or more major
> versions.

I see no contradiction here: one could do both.

The advantage of talking to the development team, apart of fixing the
problems in future releases, is that the workarounds will be of higher
quality and will run smaller risk of introducing new bugs because the
person who proposed a workaround missed some aspects of the problem or
didn't understand well enough the true nature of the issue.

It's a win-win situation, and the effort of reporting an issue
upstream is not that significant.