[rant] frustrating quodlibet bug-handling

[ArneBab]

Quodlibet in tree has been in a non-working state for the last few months - ever since a GTK2 update broke its list view. A while ago I hacked around that by installing quodlibet 2.5.1 in my local overlay. All it needed in the end was renaming the ebuild, but hunting down the reason for the breakage took so much time that I decided to write a blog post about that.

I also noted my solution in the relevant bug report in the Gentoo bugtracker, hoping that this would quickly get it fixed.

Now it is 3 months later, ample time to rename an ebuild from quodlibet-2.5.ebuild to quodlibet-2.5.1.ebuild. Today I installed quodlibet at work, and the panes came up empty. There’s a super-simple solution, but it gets ignored. I was a bit annoyed, but decided to do it right this time.

So I created an ebuild for quodlibet und quodlibet-plugins 2.6.3, tested them, created version-bump bugs and attached the ebuilds. I explicitely wrote in that bug report, that it is no duplicate, because quodlibet 3.0.2 is a separate branch.

5 minutes later my bug was closed without comment as duplicate of the 3.0.2 bug, and it’s severity reduced from “critical: the software hangs, crashes or causes you to lose data” (which is a good fit for ‘can no longer show any playlists’) to “normal: It’s a bug that should be fixed”.

I reopened the bug, stating again, that it is no duplicate because 3.0.2 is not a direct successor, but the port to gtk3.

2 hours later it was closed again and the other bug was renamed to sound like a simultaneous version bump to 2.6.3 and 3.0.2. But the closer did not even take the time to copy over the ebuilds. Instead the only open 2.6.3 version bump now looks like there were problems with bumping 2.6.3, even though there is a working ebuild for that - the one I created which is now hidden in a closed duplicate.

All of that together feels like a big “fuck you” to me - it’s the worst experience I ever had when contributing to Gentoo. It is even worse, because I took the time to go for a clean solution which would benefit all Gentoo users, upload that and actually document why that’s the way to go. This was no quick hack. It was the solution to a problem which has been needlessly crippling quodlibet users for months.

And things like this simply should not happen.

Sorry for pushing this onto you like this. I needed to drop this at some place where people can do something about it.

And thank you for reading up to here.
_________________
Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it. - Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

pkgcore: So fast that it feels unreal - by doing only what is needed.

[ArneBab]

Great, now they add 3.0.2 to the tree and close the bug - which has been renamed to “=media-sound/quodlibet-{2.6.3,3.0.2}…version bump”.

Closing that implies that 2.6.3 is in the tree, too, but that is not the case.
_________________
Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it. - Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

pkgcore: So fast that it feels unreal - by doing only what is needed.

[jrittenh]

Well, that's definitely frustrating. As a fellow quodlibet user frustrated by the 2.5 breakage (but not enough to actually fix it), that's extremely disappointing to hear. I updated to 3.0.2, so I'm now back up and running, but 2.6.3 definitely belongs in the tree, seeing how 2.5 is completely broken. I see nothing to explain why your 2.6.3 ebuild hasn't been accepted in the 3.0.2 bug.



Sorry I'm not much help, but to me it looks like the maintainer is just being a pain.

[ArneBab]