[marcosdumay]

I guess it's a reminder that most distros still don't have some way to report a bug for their package maintainers that is easier than reporting it upstream.

Debian is almost there, but it's stopped almost there for a long time already.

[Gigachad]

I have reported maybe 20 bugs to distros, I don’t remember a single one receiving any attention before they auto close for being old. Reporting to upstream almost always gets some kind of response and usually a resolution. Fedora was packaging a 5 year old version of LMMS because for some reason upstream decided to label the last 5 years of updates as RC versions despite them being vastly more stable and feature filled than the last "stable". I reported a few of the bugs found in this old LMMS on the redhat bug tracker and no one responded. Upstream had fixed these long ago.

These days I think distros should ship only the core OS components and let tools like flatpak give you user level apps direct from the source. I largely don't care about having the absolute latest version of Gnome or systemd. But I very much do care that all of my applications, especially internet connected ones are. I stopped using distro packaged telegram binaries because it would take a month before they got updated and in that time I'd have to use my phone to view all the unsupported messages sent.

[johnny22]

this is what Fedora Silverblue is like and probably opensuse's MicroOS (i think that's whwat it's called).

[Gigachad]

I had used Silverblue for a little over a year and I think it’s certainly the future of Linux distros. I had a fair bit of difficulty but none of it was intrinsic to the tech and more just 3rd party packages that didn’t quite work properly. I really loved “toolbox” though.

[bee_rider]

I wonder if the issue could be solved by upstream. Spin up a new email address for each release -- xscreensaver-1.0@some_domain.org, then once they've moved on to version 1.1, set up an auto response and stop checking the email address.

[smoldesu]

I mean... for the most part, these are issues that the upstream maintainers should be fixing. For example, the font rendering in Bottles broke when they updated to GTK4. Instead of fixing this in the actual GTK4 codebase, the GNOME foundation recommended that everyone start using Flatpak, where they could apply a very specific system patch that works around this issue.

This is the problem with encouraging this "use our kitchen sink" behavior. It encourages poor development practices, and it ends with developers grovelling and asking users to switch their packaging systems. Imagine if you tried installing an app on Windows or MacOS, and they demanded that you install a separate package manager along with it. It's an unacceptable demand to make of anyone, and certainly shouldn't be the behavior we encourage if we want to live in a world of high-quality Free Software.

[viraptor]

> Imagine if you tried installing an app on Windows or MacOS, and they demanded that you install a separate package manager along with it

This is basically how Windows works. There's no package manager, so effectively anyone shipping larger software ships their own auto updater, their own dependencies and either embeds or downloads extra installers for the MS redistributables at install time. They don't ask you, just effectively do it anyway.

[erik_seaberg]

Windows did get a package manager with dependency support, it’s just that many developers are still shipping custom installer programs that ignore it and almost all the users are still willing to run those installers.

[viraptor]

Winget? That only started existing recently. Systems that are still supported don't include it. I'd wait a couple years before devs even start seriously considering it.

[erik_seaberg]

I'm thinking of Windows Installer (the MSI engine and database). I haven’t been in that world for a while, but it looks like winget is a frontend to a repo of MSIs or custom installers or whatever the store uses.

[viraptor]

MSI doesn't do dependencies though, does it? You can launch one installer from another, for example if you want to install a .net framework with the app, but they're completely unrelated afterwards. There's no built in mechanism for updating them either.

[marcosdumay]

If the upstream maintainers should fix, the distro maintainer is quite capable of forwarding the bug there.

The upstream developers here are complaining because they get the bug reports, but can't fix the issue (at least the way they want to).

That's independent on those few large groups that poped-up on the FOSS community that push a lot of badly maintained software. Yes, those are a problem too, just a different one.

[Arnavion]

Yes. In the past users did start by reporting bugs to their distro, and the distro package maintainer then forwarded it to upstream if necessary. But lately users have become more savvy about talking to upstream directly. Probably because upstream source control has become more standardized and well-known (GitHub, etc) and easier to work with (don't have to futz with mailing lists and etiquette, just click the "New Issue" button).

It's not even specific to Bottles or Flatpaks or whatever; it happens with regular Linux software too. In the systemd tracker you'll find people complaining about issues that have been fixed in systemd's git repo, but because the people are running distros with older versions they think the issue hasn't been fixed yet.

[jeroenhd]

It's no wonder people have started to report problems upstreams because downstream bug reports rarely ever get picked up on. If they do, it's with 10 comments of "okay, try it with this" which don't work and then nothing until a bot closes the bug because a new major version came out and therefore all bugs are now no longer relevant.

Most error messages I've googled have led me to unresolved Linux bugs in various distros. Fedora users seem especially good at reporting bugs to their distro maintainers, though this does not always result in any kind of solution.

In my opinion, every distro should be allowed to ship their version of a package, but the moment packages get frozen (i.e. for LTS distros) or custom patches get added (i.e. Debian) all contact links to upstream developers should be removed immediately and replaced with the email address of the maintainer of the package. This should hopefully prevent the jwz problem while at the same time bringing the users of these distros the stable release cycle they want.

[johnny22]

I wonder how many people are like me though. I never look at the contact information in the package metadata. I just jump directly to a search engine.

If more people are like me, then that wouldn't help solve the problem at all.

[jeroenhd]

That's also fine if you specify your distro name and use your distro specific bug tracker to report your issues, unless you're pulling in the official distribution of upstream software through something like Flatpak that bypasses your system.

Even then I've found that many Flatpaks are broken on Ubuntu that work fine on Manjaro. Weird distro configurations really are a terrible burden on developers, this stuff makes me never want to publish software that gets absorbed into distros.

Mozilla was right to force Debian to rename their modified version of their browser. More packages should use such policies in my opinion, especially if they're complex to set up right like this piece of software.