[Remind-Fans] debian upgrade and remind no longer works

[david cuthbertson]

Sorry for the long post here, but putting it all down
in print helps me to clarify my own thinking.

The problem seems to me /not/ that remind no longer
works in Debian testing, but that it does not work as
it used to. My questions are therefore:
(a) is this new version behaviour a bug => file a bug
report with Debian
(b) or, was the old version behaviour a bug that has
now ben fixed => do nothing
(c) should this behaviour change be better documented
=> file a bug report.

Now some background to help get my head straight.
Please correct me if I am wrong here. My understanding
is that the purpose of Debian is to be conservative
and boring, so that it works as reliably as possible.
Any new application version has to go through a long
cycle of moving from Debian experimental, to unstable
(Sid), to testing (Lenny, which is what I am currently
running), and eventually to stable (Etch). Debian
stable is only released when it is considered as being
truly stable, regardless of how long that might take
(often years, rather than months).

Needless to say bugs do get found, even in Debian
stable, but it is the old version that is patched,
rather than newer versions being brought foreward.
Yes, we all know new application versions contain
fixes for old bugs, but they also introduce a whole
new set of bugs, which in turn require,...

This is presumably why Debian package maintainers
often get accused of mangling old versions of
applications. Which may have happened in this case.

On my desktop I run a play a tune, shout a message
reminder:
remind -z '-k( mplayer
'/home/david/m/music/strauss/2001.mp3' ; xmessage %s)'
.reminders
It may not be elegant, but it works for me.

This never used to require ' .reminders'. Now it does.
A Debian bug report #469420 concerning this was posted
by Steve M. Robbins on 4 Mar 2008. Should I post a 2nd
bug report confirming this as a bug?

Cheers,
David


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