ACKing KompoZer brokenness in Ubuntu 8.10

Okay, for everyone out there who has been frustratingly reporting that KompoZer is broken in various ways in Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex", I just wanted to say, I know. That said, I do not know why or how to fix it. So, here's a little background and explanation of where things stand.

First off, I should mention that not one bit of the actual kompozer package has changed in the latest release. That means no new code, no changes to the debian packaging format, nothing other than an automatic import from one release archive to the other (with whatever happens in that). This means that I can't just revert whatever changes were made and make everything better again, unfortunately. It also means that it's a lot harder for me to figure out what is causing the breakage (which seems to be mostly in the form of segfaults when performing particular actions, like inserting an image or opening a menu). As the kompozer package didn't change, this leads me to believe that incompatibility with some dependency is to blame (a list which includes libatk1.0-0, libc6, libcairo2, libfontconfig1, libgcc1, libglib2.0-0, libgtk2.0-0, libidl0, libpango1.0-0, libstdc++6, libx11-6, libxft2, libxt6, and zlib1g). Anyone skilled at producing and interpreting backtraces, your help would be much appreciated.

Second, we pretty much knew this was coming, just not the details of how or when. KompoZer is and has always been intended to be a temporary solution, providing a stopgap bugfix for the old Nvu project. It's based on a version of Gecko that is multiple releases old and not supported, with a slew of known bugs in it. Updating this portion is an enormous amount of work. Also, Nvu had a variety of bugs, and KompoZer could only fix some of them.

The workarounds:
There are two solutions at the moment, neither of which are particularly pretty. One is to continue using Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron". There were a few bugs reported in that release, but they were either pretty minor or unconfirmed individual cases. The big issues seem to be confined to 8.10. The second option is to use WINE. Apparently, running the Windows version of KompoZer in WINE works quite well (although I haven't messed with it myself, other users have reported success this way).

The long-term solution:
KompoZer will eventually be replaced with BlueGriffon. BlueGriffon is a complete rewrite of Nvu (by the same developer who was responsible for Nvu) using Gecko 1.9 and XULRunner. At the moment BlueGriffon is a very alpha project, and has no real releases (although the adventerous can check out the SVN repository). I have been told by the developer that we likely should expect BlueGriffon to be ready for inclusion in Ubuntu for the 9.10 release, but not before, so KompoZer users will have to suffer through for a little while.

Again, I'm afraid that the current problems are beyond my ability to figure out, tracking through the various dependencies and such, so if you're interested and able to help sort through the bugs, your help would be very useful to me and the community. Take a look at the list on Launchpad.