Shame on the Ubuntu devs

I knew something like this would happen. I just knew it!

Today I found a broken package in Kubuntu, and it got me so mad I could barely see straight. The package in question was gamin 0.0.26, which is, apparently, a replacement for FAM, which monitors the filesystem, for some reason. I discovered that this package was broken when I tried to configure ivman and autofs (I'll discuss that later). I noticed that after I closed the file manager window, my automounted USB storage device was not being unmounted. It turns out that gamin continued to monitor the mount point, preventing the drive from unmounting.

The really sucky thing about this problem was that there is no way to disable gamin. Apparently it's linked directly with the KDE libraries and is started automatically. There's no way to stop it from starting and if you kill it, it just respawns immediately. Fortunately, though, I found a post on Ubuntu Forums that linked to unofficial, third-party gamin 0.1.0 packages. After installing these, the problem went away.

So that's strike one for the Ubuntu guys. I can't believe they didn't backport a fix for such a truly sucky state of affairs. And I'm not even going to talk about depending so heavily on a package that hasn't even reached release 0.1.0! What were they thinking!?!

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