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

Doug Brown documents
the long journey to fixing a bug in the GDebi utility for
installing Debian packages. He first encountered the bug in
Ubuntu MATE 18.04: 'at the time I just ignored this
issue. I didn't want to deal with it. I went off to the trusty Linux
terminal and installed Chrome that way instead'.

Two and a half years ago, I committed to doing more open-source
contributions in my free time and was finally irritated enough about
this problem to look into it. I searched around for more info. Lo and
behold, lots
of people
were also
affected and there was already an
issue from 2019 on Ubuntu's bug tracker about it.

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

Brown notes that the fix is
now packaged for the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release, and should be
backported to 22.04 and 24.04 eventually.