Bug fix cycle for most users is 100 x slower than it need be [LWN.net]

Bug fix cycle for most users is 100 x slower than it need be

Posted Feb 8, 2008 7:48 UTC (Fri) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)
Parent article: LCA: Disintermediating distributions

There is one important thing that hasn't been mentioned so far, namely the speed of the
bug-fix cycle. Consider the majority of LWN readers; technically literate, able to file good
bug reports, and probably write some software of our own. Yet, we don't want to delve into
every single program. 

For example, I run Ubuntu, and I update every 6 months. I can't deal with all the
instabilities of running a devel version on my primary system. Let's say I find a bug in KDE,
which particularly annoys me.

(1) The KDE folks will quite reasonably expect me to test with the latest release before
filing the bug report. But I'm running a version somewhere between 3-9 months old, even though
I track the latest Ubuntu release. It's a major effort to re-build KDE, just to verify a
bug-report.

(2) If the bug gets fixed, (or has already been fixed), it will take an average of 3 months
before I get to evaluate, comment on, or benefit from the fix.

As a result:
  * The vast majority of technical users produce bug reports of limited value to upstream;
this is a huge waste of potential talent.
  * Motivation is limited, since most people don't get the benefit of the fixes for the bugs
that they report, in a timely manner.
  * Multiple people hit the same bug, even if it's fixed, because it doesn't get pushed
downstream. Again, a huge waste of time.
  * The oops-report-fix-enjoy cycle takes up to 9 months, instead of 3 days.

My suggestion is that distros should automatically backport every package on a nightly basis,
and provide binaries of the latest CVS, as well as the latest stable-release. These packages
must be built against the stable distro, and should be installable via the package manager.
(they should not be brought in by default though).

I also suggest that most end-users should file most of their bug reports upstream.
Distro-developers only have the resources to be dealing with bug-fixes that they can push out
to all users, eg security and application-crash bugs.

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Bug fix cycle for most users is 100 x slower than it need be

Posted Feb 8, 2008 10:10 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

You can use Ubuntu Hardy right now. Or Debian Unstable. Or Fedora RawHide. OR whatever. But
most users are not able to cope with the nightly upgrades and weekly breakages.

It takes some debugging to get a stable distibution that will "just work" for a user.

Also: what do you mean by "must be built against the stable release"? A KDE 4 program should
be built against the KDE4 libraries in the stable version or from the nightly build? The libc
version from the stable or from the nightly? Xorg from the stable or from the nightly?

Bug fix cycle for most users is 100 x slower than it need be

Posted Feb 15, 2008 2:28 UTC (Fri) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

I have always graduated towards rolling release distros, or in the case 
of KDE, rolling cvs/svn builds.

Derek