2003 Linux Timeline: February [LWN.net]

2003 Linux Timeline: February

Posted Jan 7, 2004 13:09 UTC (Wed) by Tadu (guest, #11339)
Parent article: 2003 Linux Timeline: February

Myth:

mICQ is trojaned to fail on Debian

Fact:

mICQ, as distributed on micq.org, compiles to essentially the same binary on any Linux distribution.

Of course, you don't need to believe me. Just try it yourself on your Debian box (?=0,1,2,3,4,5,...):

cd /tmp        
wget http://www.micq.org/source/micq-0.4.10.?.tgz    
md5sum micq-0.4.10.?.tgz 
# compare to release announcement        
tar -zxf micq-0.4.10.?.tgz        
cd micq-0.4.10.?        
./configure        
make

The news entry also conveniently forgets to mention that Debian did remove my name from the list of authors of mICQ and refused to fix it, despite me having written large parts of current mICQ from scratch.

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2003 Linux Timeline: February

Posted Mar 8, 2007 22:15 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

The spat may have been over reasonable grievances, but mICQ _was_ trojaned to fail on Debian. It was trojaned in such a way that the normal debian build procedures would produce a non-working program, although all the programs produced in the development phase would work fine. For details, see this discussion: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/02/msg01078.html

therefore:

FACT:

mICQ was trojaned to fail on Debian

2003 Linux Timeline: February

Posted Mar 9, 2007 16:52 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

"mICQ was trojaned to fail on Debian"

Well, mICQ's author inserted code to make the Debian maintainer look like a boob (and it worked!). Using the word "trojan" to describe this is a little strong, don't you think? While it may technically be correct, it almost certainly gives the reader the wrong impression. mICQ's author certainly did NOT have the same motives as 99.9% of trojan writers, and the outcome was totally different too.