https://socially.drinkingatmy.computer/objects/4df5b6b4-102f-4854-8721-480d56380e0c
I use debian btw 🙈
I like debians dad bud 😻
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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I lost a lot of respect for Debian due to the way they handled the whole issue with xscreensaver.
This is a challenge all distributions have which want to keep stability, which means shipping older versions (ideally with long term support) with only security updates for the lifetime of the distribution. It's totally ok for upstream developers to not support any of those old versions too; they're not being paid either.
That's a super long thread, is there a good summary somewhere for those of us who suffer from "bookmark this for later and then never revisit it" flavors of neurodivergence?
The gist of it is jwz, the maintainer of xscreensaver, received a ton of bug reports for bugs he fixed ages ago because Debian refused to update to a newer version citing "stability" as a reason. He added a warning dialog to his software to warn users that they are running an outdated version and to not report bugs to him. Debian maintainers patched it out because they are legally allowed to do so according to the license. I consider this is GNOME level of assholery. They decided on a shitty policy and then made it someone else's problem.
Having just read the whole thread;
xscreensaver developer jwz added an allcaps/all bold notification to xscreensaver that says that the current xscreensaver version is really old. This notification could not be user canceled / okayed through. The author did this because he apparently received several emails about xscreensaver versions that were years out of date.
Debian stable's policy is to make no updates unless they are security or bug related. This directly conflicted with jwz's policy of only supporting the latest version of xscreensaver.
The Debian maintainers chose to remove the unskippable warning as the other options were harder to maintain / worse to use. This was specifically permissable in the xscreensaver license, but against the authors stated wishes to have xscreensaver removed entire if the warning could not be kept or the software could not be updated.
Of note, jwz escalated to yelling at the first reporter about this in his first email and swearing at another reporter in his second. The Debian stable team offered suggestions which would direct Debian users to the Debian development team for bug reports about the old versions of xscreensaver, but jwz's hostile approach made that not happen at all.
If I install debian stable it's because I want it to work, and to not be bothered about anything that doesn't need to happen. That's whole point of having Debian stable around. One of the points made in the discussion, which I strongly agree with, is that Linux software is managed in a repository, not individually. A windows program telling me out of date is obnoxious, but expected. A Linux program telling me it is out of date is a obnoxious and unexpected. (Fucking discord...)
The xscreensaver author shot himself in the foot with this one; presumably he wanted to avoid being harrassed over old versions of xscreensaver. What he ended up doing was telling everyone with an old version of xscreensaver that they need to update and then guaranteed they would harass thim about it by not giving the users an option to ignore and walk away from the message.
I consider jwz response entirely reasonable. The initial message immediately suggests going against his wishes and the rest of the thread is about whats good for Debian which is a project that jwz never wanted to be involved in but suddenly its his problem. If I where in his situation I would tell them to go fuck themselves as well. Its just incredibly disrespectful to the person who did the actual work.
Well yeah. This whole thread was started in the Debian bug tracker. Of course the focus is going to be on what's good for Debian. The fact that jwz showed up immediately means they followed the Debian bug tracker, which begs the question, why would jwz subscribe to that if they didn't want to be there? It also sets the tone for the whole discussion. Original reporter was whiny, but, like, it was directed at the Debian team, not jwz. jwz chose to insert themselves into the Debian bug tracker discussion, and also chose to be aggressive about it.
That's fair, honestly. jwz owes the Debian team fuck all. But the other half of that is that the Debian team tried to work out a middle of the road solution and were met with immediate hostility.
You can't work with someone who doesn't want to work with you, so you do what's best for your project and just move on.
Doesn't seem like there where any great replacements for XFCE's screensaver without potentially breaking things.
Debian isn't the only stable distro, it and distros like it fill an inarguably societally important role at this point. Its reasonable to not push patches unrelated to bigfixes and security to a stable distro.
Its also reasonable to expect a developer to figure out a way to send canned responded to bug reports, and also require a version number with bug reports, throwing out any with missing or outdated versions. You know, because there are going to be people with outdated computers no matter what their distro does. Who knows, maybe I'm crazy.
Interestingly, this wasn't Debian's worst "fix"
That's really bad. It also seems like they patched OpenSSL without ever intending to upstream the changes.
The openssl change was communicated with upstream at the time, but no one from upstream pointed out the issue (not surprisingly, because the change seemed like an innocuous fix to an unassigned variable.)
We (Debian) fix bugs and send upstream the changes all the time, so this kind of thing happens. (Upstreams introduce these kind of bugs too; it's the nature of software development.)
Given the number of times I've had to triage issues caused by mispackaged Debian builds, I'm baffled that Debian maintainers are under the impression that their users generally know they're supposed to report problems to the package maintainers rather than upstream. Maybe people who've been using Debian since the naughties do, but for the average user, Debian seems to be crafted specifically to generate duplicate upstream issue reports.