Knowing where to send a patch

Deciding whether to send a patch to the Upstream project or to Debian can be difficult to contributors who aren't used to the process. Ubuntu's relationship with Debian is complex it can be difficult to understand who's responsible for what. Both Debian and a project's original authors are "upstream" of Ubuntu but here "upstream" means the original application developers.

When to send to Debian

Debian is responsible for the packaging of applications; This is ensuring that they build, install and remove correctly. Most patches affecting installation and removal of packages should be sent to Debian. Here is a list of issues that should normally be sent to Debian:

• Missing icons, desktop files (Applications menu entries), man pages or documentation files
• Errors in default configuration files or init scripts
• Errors when installing, upgrading or removing a package can often be present in Debian too
• Packages failing to build correctly (FTBFS) can often be sent to Debian as the same issue may affect their package. However, you should first attempt to check that the Debian package fails to build before sending it up.

As a rule of thumb, any patches that only affect files in the debian directory should be sent to the Debian bug tracking system (it's rare for these files to ever need to go all the way upstream to the original developers). Most bugs tagged with the "packaging" tag are also prime candidates to be sent up to Debian.

When to send Upstream

Generally, patches should be sent to the upstream developers when it fixes an issue with the application itself. Crashes, incorrect outputs and unexpected program behaviour are all issues with the application itself, so should be sent to the original coders.

• Crashes, lock-ups, hangs, failures to start
• Incorrect/unexpected outputs
• Memory leaks, excessive CPU usage
• Patches which do not touch the /debian directory should normally be sent to the original developers

Essentially everything not listed in the Debian section above should be forwarded to the original upstream authors. If the upstream is not available, for instance if the project is no longer active, it can still be maintained in Debian, so all patches for such projects should be forwarded there.