Bug reports 🐞on🐛any🦠software🪲

I often need to link to another post, often my own. Naturally I find the cached version of the post on the host I am logged into. But that link is not sensible for sharing. The corresponding URL on the host of the community is universally reachable by all federated participants.

So how do I get that link? It should be the fedi icon.. but no, that’s shit. I have to navigate to the original host, find the community, then browse or search for the post there. It’s such a shitty design.

I posted this, which links to another thread of mine. The preview produced such a big heap of garbage that I decided to just delete the URL. But URLs cannot be deleted in an effort to work around another bug (a shitty preview).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50840810

Page 8 of the dot2texi manual gives this example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{arrows,shapes}
\usepackage{dot2texi}
\begin{document}
% Define layers
\pgfdeclarelayer{background}
\pgfdeclarelayer{foreground}
\pgfsetlayers{background,main,foreground}
% The scale option is useful for adjusting spacing between nodes.
% Note that this works best when straight lines are used to connect
% the nodes.
\begin{tikzpicture}[>=latex’,scale=0.8]
% set node style
\tikzstyle{n} = [draw,shape=circle,minimum size=2em,
inner sep=0pt,fill=red!20]
\begin{dot2tex}[dot,tikz,codeonly,styleonly,options=-s -tmath]
digraph G {
node [style="n"];
A_1 -> B_1; A_1 -> B_2; A_1 -> B_3;
B_1 -> C_1; B_1 -> C_2;
B_2 -> C_2; B_2 -> C_3;
B_3 -> C_3; B_3 -> C_4;
}
\end{dot2tex}
% annotations
\node[left=1em] at (C_1.west) (l3) {Level 3};
\node at (l3 |- B_1) (l2){Level 2};
\node at (l3 |- A_1) (l1) {Level 1};
% Draw lines to separate the levels. First we need to calculate
% where the middle is.
\path (l3) -- coordinate (l32) (l2) -- coordinate (l21) (l1);
\draw[dashed] (C_1 |- l32) -- (l32 -| C_4);
\draw[dashed] (C_1 |- l21) -- (l21 -| C_4);
\draw[<->,red] (A_1) to[out=-120,in=90] (C_2);
% Highlight the A_1 -> B_1 -> C_2 path. Use layers to draw
% behind everything.
\begin{pgfonlayer}{background}
\draw[rounded corners=2em,line width=3em,blue!20,cap=round]
(A_1.center) -- (B_1.west) -- (C_2.center);
\end{pgfonlayer}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

It’s a broken example. gives:

ERROR: Package pgf Error: No shape named `C_1' is known.

An example in a manual should just work. What’s the problem?

Seems like a dead project. These two locations are mentioned in the manual and non-existent:

https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/dot2tex.html
http://www.fauskes.net/code/dot2tex/

(edit) CTAN location apparently moved here, but it may be out of maintenance:

https://www.ctan.org/pkg/dot2texi

All similare graphviz pkgs were last modified in 2018.

Conceptually this seems like it could be a quite useful app for getting web pages. I learned about it from @morphite88 @thelemmy.club in this thread. It’s implemented on Android and Windows (not linux? wtf).

I installed the AOS f-droid version, which is ~100mb compressed and over 500mb unpacked. Wow.. wtf that is huge. It’s based on Firefox so I wonder if that’s where all the fat comes from.

In any case, the app simply does not work. When I launch the massive thing, it tries to contact a “bootstrap server”, and fails. I do not trust the clearnet and thus force CENO over Orbot (Tor). Perhaps that’s the issue.

CENO gives an option to enter a custom bootstrap server, but my searches come up empty. Perhaps this app it too unpopular to have alternative public servers.

These devs have a history of incompetence in handling bugs. They also have an incompetently administered bug tracker, which now blocks unregistered visitors from simply viewing bug reports.

The linked bug:

Testing was done using this workflow as an offgrid user:

• Carry a laptop into an Internet cafe to fetch email and run sa-update
• From home without Internet: process the mail (which would take too long in a cafe)
• Also from offgrid home: periodically run sa-learn on false negatives and reprocess

/transparency issue/

Someone approaching SA for the first time would naturally expect sa-update to need Internet, but not SA’s scoring. The fact that SA needs an Internet uplink to score content defies reasonable expectations and fails the “principle of least astonishment”. The man page and docs in /usr/share/doc/spamassassin give no clues that Internet is surprisingly required for scoring.

When I first discovered SA’s scoring tool was accessing the net, I wrapped it with torsocks so as to mitigate leaking personal info to some extent. That worked at a time when Internet was always available to me. I should mention first that torsocks is a hack. It’s not as proper as an app that supports proxies.

Torsocks is also a somewhat futile hack because DNS lookups are often done using UDP. In attempt mitigate that risk, a tor middlebox was tried:

$ firejail --net=vnet0 --dns=\"$(ip address show dev vnet0 | awk '/inet\>/{gsub(/[/].*/,""); print $2 }')\" /usr/bin/spamassassin

But that also failed even when there was Internet and I did not keep notes on how or why.

When “torsocks spamassassin” is executed without a WAN, it behaves poorly. The output is unfriendly nonsense from a python-unaware end-user standpoint when a msg is scored:

===✂----------------------------------------

1767261476 PERROR torsocks[17588]: socks5 libc connect: Connection refused (in socks5_connect() at socks5.c:202)
1767261476 PERROR torsocks[17588]: socks5 libc connect: Connection refused (in socks5_connect() at socks5.c:202)
Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry at /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.36/NetAddr/IP/Lite.pm line 647.
Bad arg length for NetAddr::IP::Util::mask4to6, length is 0, should be 32 at /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.36/NetAddr/IP/Lite.pm line 647.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.36/NetAddr/IP.pm line 8.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.36/NetAddr/IP.pm line 8.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/NetSet.pm line 26.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/NetSet.pm line 26.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Conf.pm line 88.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Conf.pm line 88.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 71.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 71.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/bin/spamassassin line 78.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/bin/spamassassin line 78.
procmail: [17579] Thu Jan  1 10:57:56 2026
procmail: Program failure (111) of "torsocks"
procmail: Rescue of unfiltered data succeeded
procmail: [17579] Thu Jan  1 10:57:56 2026
procmail: No match on "^X-Spam-Status: Yes"

===✂----------------------------------------

It’s bizarre that compilation would be in play at this stage. The above also took painfully long, and no score was generated.

Testing in a less messy environment yielded better results:

===✂----------------------------------------

$ firejail --net=none /usr/bin/spamassassin -t < /usr/share/doc/spamassassin/examples/sample-spam.txt
…
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 4.0.1 (2024-03-25) on localhost
X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Level: **************************************************
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=1000.0 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_40,GTUBE,NO_RECEIVED,
        NO_RELAYS autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=4.0.1
…

===✂----------------------------------------

The workaround for me will be to prefix with "firejail --net=none". But that’s not ideal because it means the procmail scripts must be altered between torsocks and firejail every time WAN availability changes.

What does the “-t” flag do? That appears in USAGE.gz but the man page does not disclose any CLI options. What other CLI options are there?

SA can probably be configured to skip tests that need a WAN, but it’s likely unsurmountable for a novice user to quickly derive an advanced configuration like that. If possible, the docs should disclose a sample config for offline mode of operation.

Or even better, add a simple CLI flag “--offline”.

/several bugs and enhancement requests enumerated/

1. The man page and docs should state that Internet is used for scoring and the comprehensive docs in /usr/share/doc should state the rationale.

2. Spamassassin should be configurable to support a proxy. Ideally, users should have a choice of SOCKS and HTTP proxies. Note that DNS lookups often use UDP which the Tor network will not carry. So if a proxy is supplied SA should also take care to use TCP.

3. When a task requires a WAN and the WAN is unreachable, in the very least SA should give useful information and terminate more gracefully when torsocks is used.

4. Or better than ③ above, SA should continue scoring in a degraded state. It should be able to give a score without a WAN and perhaps add a warning header stating that the scoring was degraded by the lack of connectivity.

5. Document all CLI options (e.g. -t) in the man page.

6. Document a sample offline configuration.

7. Add an offline mode of operation that can be switched on the CLI.

Perhaps torsocks is somehow deceiving SA about WAN availability. If SA is not going to be smart about that scenario, then the proxy option is needed. A proxy option is needed anyway, in fact. And the proxy option should be prominently documented and encouraged because there are security compromises when running with default configs over the clearnet.

Comment from the idiot (Bill Cole) who closed the bug:

No SpamAssassin Bug is described here.

You are free to take this structureless conversational topic to the SpamAssassin Users mailing list.

#rspamd is probably a better tool. SA devs have been incompetent as long as I remember.

When Ungoogled Chromium is installed as follows:

http://web.archive.org/web/20260108185143/https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Aungoogled_chromium&package=ungoogled-chromium

An expired key gets in the way.

I finally escaped a rabbit hole 🕳 after a ~week-long struggle due to bug 385 and several python packaging bugs. Bug 385 broke the offline capability of Argos Translate sometime before Jan.2024. The OP’s advice worked incidentally at that time but no longer works. Apparently the release version that was in PyPi around mid-May 2024 still worked. Apparently the release cycle spans 5+ months. That window of time is far behind us now.

As of late Dec.2025 both the latest git version and the PyPi-indexed release still had the same bug.

To complicate matters, there is no version transparency (no --version cli option and pipx is blind to version numbers as well). Argos Translate is not packaged for Debian either, so no way to see or control versions with apt.

Does any distro include Argos Translate?

It’s a critical show-stopping bug for all who use Argos Translate offline. I wonder if there is an assumption that everyone’s PCs are all online anyway, so no need to treat the bug as a priority.

(#showerThoughts: might it be interesting if a live linux distro were designed to cater for air-gapped off-gridders that only has apps that work offline? And have a rich catalog of such apps?)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/47790706

I just encountered the same confusion as others in the linked thread. The pipx tool has this in the man page:

       --pip-args PIP_ARGS
              Arbitrary pip arguments to pass directly to pip install/upgrade commands

So of course I had a space after --pip-args. It failed because the software does not work as documented. Someone reported this in 2019. The software is still inconsistent with the docs. Yet someone closed the bug report.

Re-opening or requesting re-opening requires licking Microsoft’s boots. I’m done with MS Github logins.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/47684973

This page says:

6.6. What do I do if my jigdo download gets interrupted? If your download gets interrupted, all you need to do is restart jigdo-lite and hit ENTER at all the question prompts. Jigdo-lite will pick up where it left off.

But when I re-run jigdo, it says:

The temporary directory `./debian-13.2.0-amd64-BD-1.iso.tmpdir' already exists. Its contents ARE GOING TO BE DELETED (possibly after having been copied to the image, if they are of interest for it). If you do not want this to happen, press Ctrl-C now. Otherwise, press Return to proceed.

So which is lying, the tool or the docs?

update

I just realised it was a problem of poorly written text and sloppy reading. I mentally skipped what was in parathesis, which was important.

Strange that it would build a partial image before continuing.

I would say there’s still a minor bug here, just in the bad under-emphasised wording.

I’ve been producing sidebars to the left of a body of text using the framed package, which only gives black results reliably. The colorframed pkg is a hackjob of patchwork that tries to fix color problems from framed. But apparently it does not support a color leftbar. It’s a shame because I am creating a package that makes use of both leftbar and pdfcolparcolumns. The pdfcolparcolumns can do color vertical bars but it brings baggage and side effects. So I substitute \leftbar from framed when parcolumns screws the pooch. But then I cannot color a leftbar from colorframed to match pdfcolparcolumns vertical rules.

Guess I’m fucked.. not really interested in any complex options. If there is a decent drop-in solution I would be interested.

I posted a duplicate thread because the Lemmy UI was so slow with a post submission I thought it gave up. So I deleted the dupe. But then later when visiting the same community from an mbin account the duplicate still appears.

cross-posted from: https://linkage.ds8.zone/post/543756

This seems quit serious because there is a security issue when one app can interfere with another.

If Ungoogled Chromium is running when Nheko launches, U/C instantly freezes. No i/o is possible with U/C. Then when Nheko is quit, U/C goes down with it.

I installed the app on AOS 5 in 2022. It shows the title screen then crashes. So I never used it. I recently had another look. They now impose AOS 6 or newer. So I went to Izzy’s archive and found the latest AOS 5 version (1405). Wow how fat we’ve gotten.. The APK (which is compressed) went from 12mb to 86mb. It gave some error when trying to side-load.

possible workaround

So I guess the app can’t serve me. And there is no desktop app AFAICT. I was glad to find the DB (mondoDB-based) is freely available. That beast is ~13gb compressed. Before I work on freeing up space, can anyone say whether it is practical to make direct SQL queries on it? Is it straight forward to port it to SQLite, or worthwhile to learn this new mondo DB platform?

This was discovered by Jim East:

https://slrpnk.net/post/27305276/18006810

I must say it fails the principle of least astonishment. If a user blocks Lemmy.World but subscribes to !linux@lemmy.world, for example, they obviously want to exceptionally see content in the subscribed community but nothing else from that node. But what happens is the instance block overrides the specific community subscription. So the general rule is prioritised above the specific rule.

And worse, when visiting the subscribed community it just shows no posts without reminding the user that they have a relevant block in place.

In the user settings, I have several Cloudflare instances on my blocklist (e.g. Lemmy.World). When a user from one of those instances DMs me, the sender is falsely led to believe the msg was delivered and the recipient has no way of knowing. It has a nasty side effect comparable to shadow banning.

I have not actually tested this myself. I just know that I do not recall receiving a DM from a user on an instance that I block. But the linked comment is from @wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net who discovered the bug and tested this.

When simply visiting the landing page for discuss.tchncs.de, the whole page is full of posts in communities that are hosted on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.

It’s a bit foolish because if someone wants to see posts for those communities, they would visit those nodes. If you visit discuss.tchncs.de the main timeline should show you a local timeline.

It would be sensible if someone is logged in to discuss.tchncs.de, in which case their settings would have effect. But it does not make sense to fill the page with foreign posts by non-local users to non-logged-in visitors. There is no user account and no community that traces to discuss.tchncs.de on the landing page.

Of course a visitor can click local, if they are familiar with Lemmy, but all is a shit default.

I did a search for communities with “history” in the name. It came back with !history@links.hackliberty.org even though that instance has been down for over a year. If I did not already know of that instance going down, I would just post there expecting my post to be seen, because there is no indicator of when the server was last up.

I needed to cross-post to !language@hilariouschaos.com but so many results match “language” that they cannot all be in the pull-down list (a separate bug in itself to not have a scrollbar). But extra stupid that communities a user is subscribed to do not get prioritized to the top of the list.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24727683

The fediverse w/the activitypub API sell itself as being decentralised, but it’s actually just neutral. It merely enables decentralised forums to coexist with centralised venues. The Lemmy implementation in particular does nothing to proactively promote decentralisation or counter concentrations of power.

When the software is not designed to steer toward decentralisation, centralisation persists because the network effect is left uncountered. The current stats prove that a mass majority of users and their activity are subject to the concentrated power of a few, which ultimately singularly falls under the power, oversight, and competency of the biggest walled garden in the world: Cloudflare Inc, in the US.

Calling Lemmy “neutral” is overly generous, in fact. When the stock Lemmy web client is queried for communities, it prioritises the giant centralised communities in top rankings of the search results. It’s no better than Google, where Cloudflare also dominates the top slots in web search results. This exacerbates the network effect by cattle-herding people toward increased centralisation.

Lemmy ranks decentralised communities at the bottom. And in some cases the ranking is so low that it’s out of reach when cross-posting. The cross-post mechanism forces a search for the target community, and that search does not support entry of the address of the community that includes the domain. When the list is so long it exceeds the pulldown window length, it’s out of reach.

Yes, we know centralisation is not their deliberate goal. Lemmy developers fear that newcoming novices would unwittingly post in a ghost town without strategically cross-posting and then become immediately discouraged by minimal engagement, and from there bounce back to Twitter or wherever they came from. But it must be realised that the mass nannied steering they have resorted to has cultivated centralisation that defeats the founding purpose of the fedi.

If an existing point of interest is on the map and you add a favourite with the POI highlighted, the address field is automatically correctly populated with the street address. But when the favourite is later edited for any trivial reason (e.g. to change the name or description), the address information is lost. The field is cleared.

I block all Cloudflare instances I know of (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, lemmy.ca, programming.dev, etc). But sometimes I inadvertently end up on one of the those instances when searching in a logged out state. When I login, the block rules apply (as expected). But it makes no sense to block all comments in a thread without blocking the thread’s OP.

IOW, if the OP is displayed because it is visited specifically, then the full thread with all comments should also be visible.

I am somewhat forced to use Alexandrite because the stock Lemmy client is broken on Ungoogled Chromium. So when Alexandrite cannot handle something it’s a burden. In the case at hand, Alexandrite is unable to search for a community using an exact path as the query.

Workaround: We have to use the stock client or some other client.

(edit) what is in the heads of ppl who downvote a bug? “This bug does not affect me personally so please don’t spend time fixing it”.

I am not sure why subscriptions are often not instant. Some subscriptions are forever stuck in the pending stage. The problem is that to enter a community in that state I must remember the host and community name, or I have to search for it again every single time.

The fix: put in the profile a list of pending subscriptions so we can easily enter those communities.