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@nekohayo@mastodon.social

Post #2474233

2026-05-11 04:10 UTC

It'd be great if #GTK & #libadwaita's About dialogs had a property for "Months of support per version", which would check the app's running version against its "date" field in the AppData metainfo.xml and hide the "Website" & "Report an Issue" buttons if it's too old. Thus upstream devs could avoid being the externalized cost of free "LTS" distros (users reporting issues about ancient versions) without being accused of being anti #FLOSS (like in https://gitlab.com/linuxmint/pins/mint/gnome-calendar/-/work_items/1) #MaintainerLife #Linux

Replies (5)

  • @nekohayo@mastodon.social 2026-05-11 04:25

    If those conditions are met, the dialog could also automatically show an educational infobar saying, "Issues must be reported to the package distributor instead of upstream, as the version is beyond the support lifecycle of this application's actual developers (upstream)", and to please leave us alone because a majority of #FreeSoftware devs have a thousand-yards stare and want to retire to a goat farm upstate and become solarpunks or something :blobsweats: #MaintainerLife #FLOSS #OpenSource

    Open ##2877489

  • @kevinbowen@hachyderm.io 2026-05-11 04:17

    @nekohayo@mastodon.social NOT A FUCKING HOT TAKE. #Gnome #GTK and #libadwaita have ALWAYS been historically pretty disrespectful and dismissive of anyone who uses their libraries and does not comply with their latest dictates.

    Open ##2877490

  • @nekohayo@mastodon.social There is a `date_eol` field for releases in AppStream, which would be useful for this.

    Open ##2877527

  • @Isofruit@mastodon.social 2026-05-11 07:13

    @nekohayo@mastodon.social From where I'm standing your cause was right, but how the team went about it was too aggro to be productive. Your core ask was to get people to stop giving you outdated bugreports. Framing that as a problem to solve together would've gotten further here imo. That still would've ended up at the "But Debian" part of the convo, but there you could've made a decent number of arguments for them to take care of it that they would have more likely listened to.

    Open ##2877530

  • @EndlessMason@hachyderm.io 2026-05-11 10:20

    @nekohayo@mastodon.social Sounds like a job for the people packaging the software - replace the link to the upstream bug tracker with a link to the distribution's package page or man page that shows the distributed/available versions > https://manpages.debian.org/testing/x11-apps/xeyes.1.en.html Maybe even pass along a ?from={VERSION}&on={DIST} so you can add a > ⚠ hey, FYI {VERSION} has a {X} vulns reported against it. {Y} bugs have been fixed since then. The current version is {SHINY}" possibly with a pithy "{DIST} was released during the Regan administration, please consider buying a new copy of Linux Magazine to get a new install CD" or "{DIST} is old enough to drive a motor vehicle, your security department isn't going to like hearing you're still running it"

    Open ##2877532