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broken packages in ubuntu.

by felix.

something which annoys the heck out of me, already for some time, which i wanted to mention here but never managed to.
its about the current (official) version of ubuntu: natty. (yeah, another ubuntu rant. yay.)
this distribution contains at least two packages which are broken. i.e. the programs contained in the packages are useless, they just don’t work. by default. since the release (in april), nothing changed. (yes, i checked the backports and the proposed updates.) needless to say that you can find out which source code lines to modify in many web forums, as well as bug reports here and there.
the packuages in question are xpdf and sshpass. two programs i used a lot. used, because now they are broken. xpdf crashes when you open a pdf file. and sshpass just hangs. for xpdf, i now use evince as a quick drop-in, but it is different. i want xpdf back. and for sshpass, i use… well, the keyboard.
i really don’t understand how something like this can happen. that packages break is ok. but that months after bugs have been reported, fixes have been described in the report’s discussions, that after this time, nothing happens? that’s just not acceptable.
of course, i can just fix the issue by deinstalling the packages, downloading the source, and compiling the programs myself. but then, i’m responsible to check for updates and security fixes myself. auto update will just ignore the programs. i’m not really willing to do that anymore. i have better things to do with my time.
maybe i should just install arch linux the next time i want to set up a new machine. or i should even just reinstall a machine and install arch linux instead of ubuntu. cannot get worse.

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