A very open ended question !
Debian, as part of their QA process, flag problems in source packages. The recently packaged FPC 3.2.2 has quite few of them (so do many apps). Now, superficially you may see these as mostly quite theoretical or nit-picking but it is a quality question, so, do we do quality for its own sake ?
Or because we'd like to keep in Debian's good books or even to help the long suffering packaging team ? And most of these things are a problem even if a very minor one.
What are they ?
https://lintian.debian.org/sources/fpcThings like test files
not being UTF8 (or ascii) seem to be about one third of the total -
A file is not valid UTF-8.
Debian has used UTF-8 for many years. Support for national encodings is being phased out. This file probably appears to users in mangled characters (also called mojibake). Packaging control files must be encoded in valid UTF-8.
Spelling also figures highly, they have a list of common misspelling and scan against it.
There are also a host of things we probably would argue is the way it should be.
So, my question, would the FPC developers accepts fixes to some of these issues ? Its unlikely it will improve the product significantly but any change carries a risk of breaking something. My approach would be, perhaps -
Identify the ones that can easily be fixed, examine each one in context (
absolutely no automatic changes proposed here folks!) and fix it. Get, maybe ten such fixes in a batch, build the source do some superficial test hopefully focused on the possible areas affected. Submit that batch of fixes as a pull request. (or patches, or whatever you prefer).
It would be a slow process, done as a spare time activity not a key project.
So, if it worthwhile or not ?
Davo