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What to do about 8 year old unfixed bug?

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Malvineous
Posts: 24
Joined: 2011-03-16 07:18

What to do about 8 year old unfixed bug?

#1 Post by Malvineous »

Hi all,

I just went to install svnserve on a new server (newly running Debian) that will be providing SVN services to developers, but I discovered there's no way to start the service on boot unless you hack up your own init script. I was going to submit a bug report because I thought this was a pretty major oversight, but then I found this bug report from 2004 with regular "me too" comments and proposed solutions right up until April 2012.

Rather than add yet another "me too" comment to the bug, what can I actually do about it? Obviously submitting a fix won't help as there are two or three in there already which nobody seems interested in, so what next?

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62chevy
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Re: What to do about 8 year old unfixed bug?

#2 Post by 62chevy »

What I've done in similar situations is use one of the solutions in the bug report and moved on to something else.
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edbarx
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Re: What to do about 8 year old unfixed bug?

#3 Post by edbarx »

A wishlist is not a bug although it is listed as such.
Debian == { > 30, 000 packages }; Debian != systemd
The worst infection of all, is a false sense of security!
It is hard to get away from CLI tools.

Malvineous
Posts: 24
Joined: 2011-03-16 07:18

Re: What to do about 8 year old unfixed bug?

#4 Post by Malvineous »

Well it would be nice to just use one of the solutions in the bug, but the problem is this becomes rather a headache for ongoing maintenance. Instead of putting "install subversion and make it start on boot" in my server config files (in my case I'm using Puppet) I will instead have to say "install subversion and if it's not Debian make it start on boot, but if it is Debian then copy these files in place first" (because other distros do include an initscript for svnserve.) Then I have extra files floating around that aren't under control of dpkg, I have to do more testing when upgrading the svn packages, etc.

So the best option for ongoing maintenance is to include an initscript. I'm not sure why there's any resistance to it, I have plenty of other initscripts for services I don't use but I just don't load them at startup. It would be no different for those who don't want to run svnserve, but it would make things much easier for those who do.

vbrummond
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Re: What to do about 8 year old unfixed bug?

#5 Post by vbrummond »

I was curious if other distros included this or it just a debian policy?
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Malvineous
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Joined: 2011-03-16 07:18

Re: What to do about 8 year old unfixed bug?

#6 Post by Malvineous »

I don't think it's Debian policy because there hasn't even been a response saying "no we won't do it". It's just been left hanging with no response at all.

Other distributions do have an init script for svnserve. I had a quick look around - here are the ones for Gentoo, Arch and Fedora.

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