kbsingh@? hm [LWN.net]

kbsingh@? hm

Posted Aug 23, 2008 15:41 UTC (Sat) by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
In reply to: kbsingh@? hm by gvy
Parent article: CentOS on the systems intrusions at Red Hat

It's normal for developers working on high-profile projects to have "loads of open/stuck bugs" assigned to them.

While I think we should all strive to be polite, I suspect the proportion of developers that have been a little brusque with someone in private email is also pretty high.

Also, to drift more off-topic: please keep comments on any bug report focused on information that makes progress towards fixing the bug. It's not the place for opinions on the general quality of the project or the bug assignee; if your goal is to criticize either, a narrow focus on the technical issue at hand would be a more effective way to do that. Similarly, you'd make a more convincing advertisement for the competing project by sticking to specific technical information found by that project's developers, and omitting broad claims about the competitor's kernel team being "world-class" or CentOS being "crap".

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that particular one

Posted Aug 23, 2008 16:46 UTC (Sat) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

> It's normal for developers working on high-profile projects
> to have "loads of open/stuck bugs" assigned to them.
I sorta know...

Thanks for your advice -- as you might have seen, I've been actually trying to help with testing/debugging as I had that particular hardware at hand, knowing how it feels without a sample at hand. Guess being rude and rejecting such help from peers is part of being a high-profile developer of yet another RH clone... (and not forgetting/forgiving part of me :-/)

So, my sincere wishes of luck to users of this cent-class project (have quite a few friends among those, btw) :-)

that particular one

Posted Aug 24, 2008 21:28 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

CentOS sets conservative and achievable goals. They do offer some "extras" like XFS support. But the main focus is upon (bug for bug) RHEL compatibility. And they do an admirable job of that. That is pretty much what I want as an admin who deploys CentOS. I can deal with bugs as long as my workarounds don't get broken by random patches. I don't think that the CentOS team is out to "save the world". They are out to provide a community supported distro with as close as possible to 100% RHEL compatibility. A sure way to become negative about a distro is to try to use it in a situation for which it is unsuited, or try to help turn it into something it is not.

There are those in this forum who would tell me that I have done that with Fedora. And they would be right.;-)

that particular one

Posted Aug 26, 2008 13:21 UTC (Tue) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

> I don't think that the CentOS team is out to "save the world".
It's perfectly clear... it was proposed in comments above that a route for bugreports and bugfixes _could_ be attempted _if_ there are desire and resources for that. This way clone-generated bugreports might come with proposed (and probably even tested in overlay repo) fixes to have somewhat higher value in upstream bugzilla. Still such fixes would only have one way of getting into the main repo or updates: via upstream distro.

Of course, those who prefer living with known bugs because they also have known workarounds are quite in their will to cope with things this way, it's absolutely no blame for a sysadmin whose job is working systems.

Maybe they were calm children not wielding a screwdriver for no reason and always using their toys as prescribed. :)

that particular one

Posted Aug 26, 2008 21:27 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

"""
...it was proposed in comments above that a route for bugreports and bugfixes _could_ be attempted _if_ there are desire and resources for that.
"""

So make a commitment to do that. I'm sure that CentOS and Red Hat both would welcome such a valuable contribution from you.

-Steve