Re: Debian ships very old software (rplay, paps)
On 2025-11-04 20:49:31 +0100, Nicolas George wrote:
> Vincent Lefevre (HE12025-11-02):
> > Bad pointers and buffer overflows can have worst effects than just
> > a crash.
>
> Yes, but not these ones.
How do you know that?
> > Personally, I think that the fact that almost all software
> > runs on Windows or Macos is a good thing, as long as they
> > run on Linux too (otherwise I do not care). This means more
> > users, thus tends to increase the interest and the number of
> > developers, which benefits all users, including Debian one.
>
> Still missing the point and muddying the discussion.
>
> So, the fact that most software honor locale settings should tell you,
> just like the fact that most software is for Windows or Macos, that most
> developers aim their software at the average user, not power users, and
> the average user would not know a good program behavior if it came
> holding their hand to click on the right button.
In any case, paps generates a date/time string in the horrible format
of the C locale by using
strftime(date, 255, "%c", &tm);
The usual use of %c is to follow the locale from the environment
("The preferred date and time representation for the current locale.").
If the intent were not to follow the locales, another date/time format
(ISO 8601 based) should have been chosen.
> > The point is that I want to install some package (which would
> > be perfectly fine without the dependency). Telling me not to
> > install it is just silly.
>
> Then install it without the dependency. Or formulate your complain
> against the real issue.
It is not possible to install the package without the dependency.
Or do you mean that the package should be updated to drop the use
of this library (--with-rplay-library=no) and this dependency?
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
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