Gentoo developers are ricers. Idiot ricers.
Or, --fuck-upstream.

So after I mentioned #185 yesterday, which I thought was a dead ticket, I got an email from someone with that problem. Because they were trying Quod Libet 0.8.1 (over a year old) and 0.11 (almost a year old). Both of those are even pre-GStreamer. To put this into some context, that's a bug that happens when you upgrade from GTK+ 2.6 to GTK+ 2.8, which we caught even before the release of GTK+ 2.8. It makes QL basically useless, trying to edit any tags will crash it.

So I filed #124595 -- yes, not only did I get a Bugzilla account, but a Gentoo bugzilla account -- asking them to please remove Quod Libet, since no one was maintaining it, and it was just causing problems for me and users. My thought was, they remove it, users get it from our website, everyone has less support to handle, we all win. Oh no.

Closed as a duplicate of #101619, which is apparently where all the ebuilds are ending up. Awesome, why aren't these in the distribution yet? Are they going to go in? If not, this isn't a duplicate, it's still unmaintained.

Nevermind, wow. I hope they don't get into the distribution at this rate. Seriously, they have no idea what they're packaging. No, we need PyGTK 2.8, or you're going to see Debian bug #338117. No, you need GStreamer core 0.10.3 or you're going to see GNOME bug #330816. No, you can't mix and match gst-python 0.8 with GStreamer 0.10, that's just idiotic. Of course, if you'd been in contact with the people who wrote the software you're packaging, you'd know about our GStreamer 0.10 notes, where we outline all of the issues.

It doesn't do anyone a service to leave unmaintained software in a distribution. It creates more work for distribution maintainers, frustrates users who expect their distribution to not suck, and makes upstream deal with spurious bug reports. Get it right, or get it out.

Since I started writing this, I've gotten a reply. Apparently even though I didn't add the ebuild, don't maintain the ebuild, don't even use Gentoo, and I'm not demanding a fixed ebuild (just a removal of a broken package that has been broken for 6 months), it's my responsibility to fix this.

Update: It's now become a Kafkaesque situation, in which I cannot get them to do any of: Remove the software; update the official ebuilds; fix the broken unofficial ebuilds; or even contact the QL ML to learn how to properly package it.