Brown: Fixing a 6-year-old bug in Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu

Doug Brown documentsthe long journey to fixing a bug in the GDebi utility forinstalling Debian packages. He first encountered the bug inUbuntuMATE18.04: "at the time I just ignored thisissue. I didn't want to deal with it. I went off to the trusty Linuxterminal and installed Chrome that way instead".

Two and a half years ago, I committed to doing more open-sourcecontributions in my free time and was finally irritated enough aboutthis problem to look into it. I searched around for more info. Lo andbehold, lotsof peoplewere alsoaffected and there was already anissue from 2019 on Ubuntu's bug tracker about it.

[...] As is commonly the case in software development, the difficult part ofthis fix had nothing to do with the code itself. All of my effort wasspent figuring out Ubuntu's patch submission processes and advocatingfor my merge request. Nobody else seemed to be interested in doing thework to actually fix this bug that has been plaguing Ubuntu MATE andXubuntu, not to mention some Debian users, for over 6 years. Afterdealing with the long process of getting my merge request approved, Ithink I'm starting to understand why!

Brown notes that the fix isnow packaged for the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release, and should bebackported to 22.04 and 24.04 eventually.