Re: Persistent annoying fetchmail bug. Dump fetchmail? Need advice.
On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 02:00:57PM -0400, Chris Metzler wrote:
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=175721
>
> The gist of this bug is that fetchmail does not properly handle email
> with a line of text containing only an unescaped "." and nothing else.
> http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2002-February/001988.html
> Since I filed this bug, I received no ACK of any sort from the Debian
> maintainer. Indeed, no bugs filed on woody package fetchmail-ssl in the
> last three months have received a response from the maintainer.
I have an unorthodox and probably unpopular idea that doesn't directly
address your query but might someday aid others who are using that
package, whether you continue to or not (I will be one of them, as I use
fetchmail-ssl, although I haven't been bitten by this yet).
That idea is to go over the Debian maintainer's head, so to speak, and
write directly to Eric S. Raymond. Who is, AFAIK, still the author and
ultimate upstream source of fetchmail.
I am somehow quite sure that ESR didn't write fetchmail and doesn't
continue to work on fetchmail, so that it is broken for many users. This
bug seems to be quite noxious to me and while ESR might not have created
the code that melds fetchmail with ssl, I think he might at least
appreciate being made aware of this issue. What action he could take, I
do not know. But if I was in your shoes, I would write to him. Of course
*check* (on principle) the WWW page and in-package documentation for
fetchmail first to make sure there's not a note indicating that he's
already aware, but I suspect you have and there's not.
Debian maintainership problems seem hard to solve to me and one of the
big buggaboos (that's a technical term ;-) of Free Software. It appears
there's a big cultural thing that makes people refrain from levelling
criticism at maintainers who, after all, are unrenumerated. Nevertheless
I've been affected by unmaintained packages myself and it makes me grind
my teeth HARD. I don't have a solution, though. Except turn to RedHat
(or Progeny) and I am not ready to do that.
Soren Andersen
"feel free to disagree, but if you impugne my intentions you'll
merely end up in a killfile".
--
Find my GnuPG public key on better keyservers everywhere ;-)
GnuPG public key fingerprint: BD26 A5D8 D781 C96B 9936 310F 0573 A3D9 4E24 4EA6
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