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Comment by bnegreve | Hacker News Reader

For next time:

    dpkg -S path/to/file

gives the the name of the package containing a file, and

    dpkg -s package-name

gives you the name of the maintainer.

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All mails I've sent to maintainers of packages regarding issues with them have been ignored. I think they prefer you to use the bug tracker. (Which sucks, so I always end up doing nothing about it.)

In the end I switched all my servers to Ubuntu. It's been good and I love PPAs.

Ubuntu bug reporting is just as shitty. No reply for 6+ months was common for me. One time I even tracked down the issue, which was fixed upstream just one commit after the one they used for their package. Still no reaction, but about a year later they asked of the problem still persists with the current release. I didn't bother to reply and stopped reporting to either Ubuntu or Debian.

I had the same experience. After an Ubuntu update, my workstation was suddenly not able to mount an NFS filesystem from FreeBSD when Kerberos was enabled.

The bug was rather quickly marked as confirmed, with absolutely no updates for several years, even though the root cause was known. As far as I know, it still hasn't been fixed.

Exact same experience. The best bug reporting experiences I had were with arch and Nix.

My experience: I submitted a bug once, with patch, using the official bug tracker and jumping through all the hoops. It was ignored completely. When I went on IRC, the response was "perhaps you'd like to become the package maintainer?".

The bug remains to this day.

> I think they prefer you to use the bug tracker. (Which sucks, so I always end up doing nothing about it.)

Oh, so much this. The crappiness of bug reporting for Debian has meant that I stopped trying to report issues years ago.

> dpkg -S path/to/file

In the case of config files, this only seems to work sometimes -- maybe if it wasn't modified by the user? Or if it came from a package directly, and wasn't generated from its {pre,post}inst scripts?

    $ dpkg -S /etc/hosts
    dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern /etc/hosts
    $ dpkg -S /etc/resolv.conf
    dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern /etc/resolv.conf
    $ dpkg -S /etc/bash_completion
    bash-completion: /etc/bash_completion

`dpkg -S /path/to/file` only works if the file belongs to a package. `/etc/resolv.conf` gets created dynamically at runtime. `/etc/hosts` gets created at installation time because it includes the hostname (which ought to get replaced with nss-myhostname).

Thanks!

I suspect with that I can probably find the repository, so that I can check whether the comment has already been fixed, then I can work out how to submit a patch or bug.

Usually worth just following this workflow:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

That is useful for reporting bugs.

I am a developer so every now and then I make a concerted effort to diagnose a bug, then fix it, then do a pull request.

However, I do admit I usually give up before getting to the point of submitting something useful...

I like it.

    #!/bin/bash
    set -e
    set -u

    if ! [[ ${1:-} ]]; then
        echo please provide a file
    fi

    dpkg -s $(dpkg -S "$1" | cut -d: -f 1) | grep Maintainer

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