Divergulent 0.1
This is just a delightfully retconned note to say that Divergulent 0.1 was released on this date. Checkout GitHub for the details.
It appears to be Debian’s stance that the behavior I experienced is completely normal
Unsurprisingly, I awoke to a disappointing response from the Debian bugs team. The email was sent privately so I wont post it here, but it boils down to “nah man, this is normal”. On a whim, I have therefore asked the Debian TC if they have a policy on quality and correctness review of patches inserted by Debian into upstream software:
Let’s see if the Debian complaints process gets anywhere
On the recommendation of a friend on a business themed social network, I have just sent the following email to owners@bugs.debian.org about my experiences on the Debian bug tracker recently. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it.
Is this the standard of behavior we get from Debian now?
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.
I was unaware of Debian’s extrepo command…
…and its actually a pretty neat idea!
Now admittedly, I encountered extrepo when one of the repos being added to a Docker container build I care about was being unreliable, but that caused me to dig into what it is and how it works and I quite like the idea.
The basic idea is that there are people out there who publish packages for Debian, either as hilarious curl scripts which you’re meant to pipe into a root shell, or as just .deb files which you download and manually install. Instead of being terrible though, what if there was a tool which knew how to provide apt repository configurations for those things? Then, apt would do the right things when the packages changed and so forth. Those configurations could come from a central source which you could also trust to provide the GPG keys that signed those packages. Neat yeah?
ImageMagick bug?
Subject: imagemagick: If the trailing character of a montage label option is a percent sign, the output image is erroneous Package: imagemagick Version: 6:6.2.3.6-3 Severity: normal *** Please type your report below this line *** Executing this command line: montage -geometry +10+10 -tile 2 -label "-sepia-tone 15%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20a.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 35%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20b.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 55%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20c.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 75%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20d.jpg ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20.jpg Whereas this command line: montage -geometry +10+10 -tile 2 -label "-sepia-tone 15%% " \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20a.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 35%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20b.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 55%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20c.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 75%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20d.jpg ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20.jpg Produces the expected output: -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.11 Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) Versions of packages imagemagick depends on: ii libmagick6 6:6.2.3.6-3 Image manipulation library imagemagick recommends no packages. -- no debconf information
Why Debian?
Why do I use Debian? Well, one of the reasons is the bug reporting. I think I just found two bugs in ImageMagick, one a simple documentation bug, and the other a functionality bug. With Debian, I can just run the reportbug command from the command line with the name of the package, and walk through the simple bug reporting process, instead of having to fight my way through mailing lists for the dozens of different packages I have installed. It's nice.