Frankly:  if a change breaks an existing behaviour, it is a bug, even if
the existing behaviour is an unintended/"wrong" one in the first place.

Downstream users have relied on the existing behaviour and breaking it
causes pain.  In my case, I was using ghostscript to merge customized
books of black & white documents.  I know I could have used pdftk for
the merge, but AFAIK pdftk can't optimize file weight by subsetting the
embedded fonts, so I chose to rely on gs.

I appreciate the attempt to "get proper colour management" for the next
release.  In a previous life I did photographic work and know how
critical colour management is.  I am extatically happy to see colour
management trickle down to all corners of FLOSS image processing and I
am thankful to you guys for the work you are doing.

Nevertheless, this change in behaviour wasted one hour of my time and
Murphy's law has it that it was at a time when I could not afford it
because I was putting together dozens of such customized books against
an application submission deadline, and while I usually have at least
two machines available, this time I was on the road and had the laptop
only.  All of it my fault, no doubts.  Just trying to get you to
understand a user's perspective hoping that in the future you will
consciously try to mitigate such pain rather than ignore the
consequences of your changes on others.

A more elegant sequence to fix the "real bug" would have been to wait
for pdfwrite to be fixed.  Then the "invalid bug" would not have
generated pain and confusion downstream.

Thank you for reading and for being more careful next time.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1218350

Title:
  stackunderflow in .setdistillerparams

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