Comment 14 for bug 1714107

There are and have been numerous release-critical bugs in Debian's
calibre packaging. Your support for mathjax and markdown are both
*utterly* broken, due to downstream patching which is completely
incorrect. You include package dependencies that were dropped from
calibre *years* ago. You fail to include other package dependencies when
calibre's official list of module dependencies is updated. You don't run
the test suite, which would catch most or all of these errors. You
historically patched calibre to use incompatible system versions of
vendored code that was actually forked and extended with significant new
features that calibre relied on.

You disable major features of calibre, like the plugin system, claiming
that it is "unauthenticated and non-trusted" (the only conclusion I can
draw from here is that the Debian packagers consider anyone installing
*plugins* that haven't been pre-vetted by Debian, to be doing
untrustworthy things).

You apply pointless "privacy" patches to inert files which are only used
for maintenance of the https://calibre-ebook.com website, meaning your
packaging sources contain gunk that obscures what you are actually doing
and results in line noise every time you need to rebase a patch for
files that are not used. Your choice, I guess.

> we use msgpack and feedparser from the packaged versions

msgpack is a system dependency and always has been. I'm not even sure I
understand your meaning. Is there a non-packaged version that could have
otherwise been used?

feedparser is one of a number of things I personally worked to remove
from calibre upstream. It's now a system dependency for *any* distro
that builds calibre, without the need for some Debian-specific patch.
The reason is because I don't like vendored code either, but I refuse on
ethical grounds to devendor it myself, downstream, and therefore in
order to devendor it I must push those changes upstream and wait for
them to be merged and either released or backported. I've had a *lot* of
success.

(I guess I could crack the obvious openssl joke at this point.)