One of the developers of GNOME Calendar, Hari Rana, recently made public a conflict with the maintainer of a package in the Linux Mint distribution. The conflict arises from the fact that Linux Mint includes a package with a modified, outdated version of GNOME Calendar. Despite specific changes, the application is still delivered under the name GNOME Calendar, leading users to believe they are using the original project.
In the Linux Mint version of GNOME Calendar, some errors remain uncorrected, prompting users to contact the main developers of GNOME Calendar about these issues. The “About” page in the application provides contact information for the main project, which allows users to report problems directly to the developers. However, many of the reported problems are either already fixed in current versions of GNOME Calendar or are caused by changes made by the package maintainer in Linux Mint.
Several months ago, a key GNOME Calendar developer created a ticket on the Linux Mint bug tracker requesting the maintainer of the GNOME Calendar package to remove all links pointing to the main project and rebrand the application by replacing the icon. After six months of no response, the package maintainer finally asked for clarification on the problematic changes. He also noted that the supported branches of Linux Mint and LMDE use packages imported from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Debian 13, corresponding to GNOME versions 46 and 48 in those distributions.
The GNOME Calendar Developer explained that he does not have time to analyze changes in the package from Linux Mint and simply removing individual changes will not solve the underlying issue. Since the package is based on GNOME 46 and 48, significantly behind the current version, he suggested resolving the problem by either removing the package altogether or rebranding the fork and eliminating all links to GNOME.
In response, the maintainer of the package provided an answer but the conflict between the developers of GNOME Calendar and the Linux Mint package maintainer continues.