My significant other is running Debian stable on her laptop, and it has worked fine for quite a while. But since a week or two, she could not access her University IMAP account via Evolution. Obviously quite a showstopper!

Today I had a closer look, and my suspicion was that the University changed their SSL configuration due to the recent POODLE attack and that Evolution was incompatible with that. After some more searching, I found that Ubuntu had applied a patch, originally from Fedora, two weeks ago. For Debian, there is a bug report but no sign of action.

So I fetched the sources, applied the patch, built the package, installed it and things were working again. Yay for that! But this is obviously not the best way to handle such issues.

I know that Debian is volunteer driven and we often lack the manpower for certain things, so I don’t want to rant about this particular issue. I also continue to be a happy user of Debian unstable on my laptop, and Debian stable on my servers. But I seriously wonder: Can I really recommend Debian stable to users, for their laptops and desktops? If not, what are the alternatives? Ubuntu obviously comes to mind, having some full-time staff for such issues... But that would be giving up on promoting Debian as the universal operating system.

Update (2010-11-3): Laney just uploaded a fixed package. Thanks!