apt-get dist-upgrade is getting a little less fun these days.

It’s not because of a problem with Debian or with apt-get. It’s because of things upstream authors are doing.

It seems that upstreams, for some reason, like to remove features from new versions of software.

The two recent examples to bite me are the removal of the Gnome Terminal features to play the bell through sound card rather than the console speaker, and the recent upgrade to gtkpod — the best iPod music manager out there — which removed the ability to actually, well, play music. Wha…?

Earlier examples where when Gnome removed the ability to type a filename in the Open dialog box (remember that? thankfully reverted eventually.) KDE 4 was infamous for this too, with maybe thousands of instances (and they broke Amarok so badly that it didn’t actually play music from my devices either.)

I don’t understand this. The Gnome people somehow thought that they knew better than I what options I might want, I guess. But I am totally baffled about gtkpod. All it ever did was call xmms (or something like it such as qmmp) with appropriate arguments to play a file. Simple, configurable, and supremely useful. Probably just a few lines of code. And even that is gone.

There is a post by Ingo Molnar complaining that perhaps Gnome and KDE are trying to mimic the Apple and Google result without internalizing the process. Perhaps. It all seems so baffling to me though.

Updated: rewrote introduction.