So… a really really long time ago I wrote a small set of PNG utilities called pngtools. They’re not particularly complicated or anything, but a few distros decided to package them, including Debian (and therefore Ubuntu), Gentoo, Mint, and so forth. I’ve talked previously here about resurrecting the old subversion commit history and attempting to modernize the code.
And then something weird happened. A couple of weeks ago a github issue was filed against pngtools. The entire bug report is a single sentence pointing to the Debian bug tracker where people are being… weird. I think perhaps I accidentally overlapped with two things — a slightly entitled user, and people who appear to “karma farm” by pushing bug reports from Debian upstream with the minimum possible level of detail. Certainly when I look at the github history for these users they do not have a good hit rate for reporting bugs which actually result in a fix upstream. I am unclear on why they would be doing this thing if their goal isn’t either to acquire a fix or to earn some sweet sweet made up internet points.
None of that is really point here though. I don’t think the bug report is particularly valid — the user is complaining that a single information output sentence is not to their liking, which is something they could easily just grep away or whatever. My point is more about the standard of behavior that Debian seems to be ok with these days. I am also concerned that this sort of behavior seems pretty common now. Tridge is a much more accomplished engineer than me, but he too seems to be copping an amount of abuse that seems unreasonable.
Specifically, in this bug report they have:
- called my code “pointless” whilst also demanding it be fixed.
- repeatedly assert that the Debian bug tracker, not the project’s bug tracker, should be the canonical place to report upstream bugs.
- decided I am “clearly unwell”.
- when I asked for a more meaningful explanation of why the behavior was actually a bug, they simply landed a patch in the Debian package instead of engaging in a more helpful manner with me.
- called me “cognitively disheveled” by… specifically saying they wont call me “cognitively disheveled”.
- described me as having “hermeneutically challenged posture” — no, I don’t know what that means either.
The best bit of all of course is that discovering all of my personality flaws this way caused me to go and try and find other downstream bug trackers. That resulted in finding a genuine actual bug that I fixed and released a fix for the same day.
So I have questions. How do I get the various distros to notice that literally all of them are now packaging an old version of pngtools? There used to be announcement mailing lists for such things, but if they still exist I am not aware of them. Gentoo for example is shipping something which is decades old. More importantly though, is this the standard of behavior we should expect from downstream now? Is the behavior I have encountered what the Debian community now considers acceptable?
Honestly, I kind of regret fixing those bugs in 2020 when people asked nicely. I should have let pngtools go quietly into the night, especially as its not really a focus for me any more.