Most of you have probably already noticed it, but i am going to describe the situation one more time here so it gets stored in an archive somewhere. As of mICQ 0.4.10.1, the source code includes some bits that prevent mICQ from starting up on Debian boxes in specific (if EXTRAVERSION is not set to some value at compile time and the username you run the program with is not 'madkiss'). In fact, at first users think that mICQ is starting up perfectly normal, but after the client got logged in into the server, it prints the following message and exits after that: You're using the mICQ package provided by Debian. Since the Debian maintainer is extremely uncooperative, you're adviced to use the better qu ality package from micq.org. Simply add the follow ing line to your /etc/apt/sources.list to track stable versions of mICQ: deb http://www.micq.org/debian stable main To track CVS snapshots, add: deb http://www.micq.org/debian testing main Source packages may be retrieved similarly. This code can be found in file "src/preferences.c" in mICQ source code, starting at line 114. md5sum of the upstream-tarball that contains this version of preferences.c: c0c84ed9b5df0d9ced060a9eed11d36b micq-0.4.10.1.tgz I have to admit that not setting EXTRAVERSION in debian/rules is a bug, ok, but not setting such an un-important variable (it _is_ unimportant after all) should not lead to a behaviour like the one described above. It looks like the only intention behind this code is to achieve an object lesson effect for the maintainer, in cleartext, me. Again, this "easter egg" is debian specific - it will only occur on computers running Debian and using the official Debian mICQ package. In my opinion, with this step, mICQ has proven as dishonorable to be distributed with Debian anymore (especially since nobody knows what idea upstream will have as next, maybe it's a very funny 'rm -rf /'?). Thus, i would like to request removal of the package from distribution. Additionally, I suggest to consider to add this piece of software to the "unable to package" list[1]. If there are any objections or comments on this, please let me know. I'm subscribed to debian-devel, so there is no need to CC me. [1] http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/unable-to-package -- .''`. Name: Martin Loschwitz : :' : E-Mail: madkiss@madkiss.org `. `'` www: http://www.madkiss.org/ `- Use Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org
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