Bug#1020244: fonts-urw-base35: A monospaced font shouldn't have ligatures

[Markus Hitter <mah@merchantsedition.com>]

That's an odd reasoning. So you want to keep the bug, because removing it would solve the problem not only for one, but for many applications and thousands of users? For me, such a huge impact would encourage me even more (and was actually the reason why I filed a bug at all and spent 3 days to find not only a simple works-for-me fix, but the best possible solution I could find).

There is no reason to believe that upstream fixes this bug anytime soon (by applying the patch or some other way). Upstream bug is over a year old, with no attempts to solve it, not even a comment from the repo owner. Last commit to the upstream repository is almost a year old. URW++'s last contribution is over 5 years old. Clear signs of abandoned development.

Also, once upstream solved the problem, removing the packaging patch again is trivial. Even better, upstream might see next year that the fix works fine and commit it as 'proven working'.

I'm not surprised at all that Debian runs into unmaintained upstream software. That's simply how the software world works. Developers write some code, are happy with the result, then they move on to their next project. 5 years later this software is still useful, but original developers have long forgotten what they did back then. When a bug is found, they're just as clueless as anybody. Only few very big projects receive continued development for many years.

Debian's answer to this can't be to ignore known bugs in unmaintained projects. Or worse, drop their packages. Much better is to also maintain fixes. AFAIK, all major OS developers do this, Apple, Microsoft, Google, you name it. Debian's packaging patch mechanism is there for a reason, it should be used for the best experience of Debian users: bug-free software packages.

Markus