Xscreensaver has apparently been checking for updates and is disappointed that it hasn't had one for 14 months because Debian is too stable. Can anyone recommend a linux screensaver which would work with xfce and can be trusted to never do that?
This is a daily reminder that "stable" means "unchanging" and in no way refers to the quality of the code. It doesn't mean "won't fall over"... That's a different type of stable which debian stable absolutely does not guarantee.
A bug in debian will remain present in debian until the next update a year from now. If the bug breaks your workflow, then find a new workflow or a new distro.
If you received constant complaints from users about bugs that you had resolved years ago, but package maintainers refused to package, you'd probably get sick of it too.
Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has blog posts about how everyone in the world uses curl, and as a result include the curl license in their readme, which means he gets mail from people upset about their car not working.
Steam had a big thing recently because the snap of Steam is not official. But yet, they get a TON of bug reports for things that are only broken in the snap.
I imagine having the same conversation of "That bug is already fixed as of 8 months ago" "Well how do I install the latest release?" "I dunno, talk to your distro about that" on a super regular basis, it starts being something that is incredibly infuriating. No one wants to take the anger of aggressive upset people, especially when the fault lies with someone else. He has asked Debian to stop shipping out of date versions of his software in the past. But because open source, they are not obligated to, so he has very limited ways to protect his own interests.
Your issue sounds like it's with Debian for shipping incredibly out of date software and putting jwz into this position in the first place and not with jwz.
A lot of people don't know this though. They think it is the "won't fall over" type. They hear "use debian over ubuntu, because it's more stable" or "use debian for servers, because it's more stable" and think it means "You want uptime, so you dont want something crashing". So when they see a bug, it is concerning to them. A distro focused on not falling over must super care about reducing crashes, and don't realize the exact opposite is actually true. The bug was fixed a long time ago, but you don't get it because "don't change" is more important than "don't crash".
If the bug is in a popular package (ie, a super common screensaver) in a very popular distro (and a lot of people have chosen the distro because they think it has less bugs than others), I can imagine the maintainer getting fed up with the bug reports for a bug that was already fixed.
Most people I've seen on Lemmy understands that "stable" means "unchanging"... But every person I've talked to outside of lemmy, thinks it means "less bugs". So clearly it's a very big misunderstanding (Which is basically confirmed by the fact that xscreensaver gets so many invalid bug reports that they felt necessary to do this.)
Oh look. Debian changed the keepassxc package and now the keepassxc repo is getting all the bug reports for it. Their stance is "it will go away in a year or so"
Regardless of whether or not it is a good idea, it's undeniable that Debian makes a lot of decisions that negatively impact their upstream. And since it's someone else's problem, oh well.
There is a reason upstream repo maintainers wind up angry about problems that someone else caused.