My experience from handling both distro-reported and upstream-reported
bugs shows that these two worlds/communitites are really quite different
in their nature.
Bug reporters who report bug in the vanilla kernel are usually perfectly
fine when someone sends them patch to test, they don't have any problem
recompiling the patched kernel, testing, and reporting back.
This is not the case with distro kernel bug reporters at all. You usually
can't just tell them "hey, this patch might fix it, report back if it
does". Vast majority of theese users expect the kernel package built for
their distro to be provided, so that they can easily install it and test
it, but requiring any other effort usually doesn't work.
Just my $0.02.
--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs
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