On #debian.de, someone looked for an application to record the screen.

So I tried finding the appropriate applications. On first try I found istanbul, but I remembered there was another one. I looked at the description of istanbul and tried searching some more. I remembered it was a city name, too, so I googled and finally found byzanz, too.

Thus I filed a wishlist bug (#391860) on byzanz and istanbul to unify their descriptions, and maybe both use the terms “desktop session record” and “screencast”.

The bug on “byzanz” was immedeately closed, with no discussion taking place.

Pretty much a “I like my description, closing the bug”.

This is not ok. It’s just a wishlist bug. There is no harm in keeping it open anyway. And the package description is something you can always improve. Maybe tag it wontfix (however the next maintainer might want to fix it, after all). But just closing it twice (I reopened it once, stating that it is not fixed and thus shouldn’t just be closed; I don’t play bug ping-pong) without any discussion is not okay IMHO. To me this is just arrogant: “I don’t want any wishlist bugs on my packages, and I don’t care for your opinion.”

We’ve now been talking a bit on IRC; and it’ll eventually be fixed on the next upload. But still I’m pretty annoyed by this reply I got back to the bug report… I think what helped is that the official description says “Record your desktop session to a GIF file”, which contains exactly the word combination I was missing… “session record”, because I’m not recording audio.

Maybe the description should also contain the word “application”, because after all that is what I’m very likely to want “record” an “application” (and not my full desktop).

[Update: he didn’t close the bug a second time. This was to a delayed email processing on bugs.debian.org, which processed the -done message after my reopen command. Sorry about this inaccurancy.]