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Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld)Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld)Posted Aug 29, 2008 1:32 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767)Parent article: Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld)
Red Hat, and by extension, CentOS are very conservative about changes made during the course of a stable series, and certainly during an individual release. More so than a lot of Linux users are prepared for. However, I agree with their policies. A fix for some users may break things for others.
In, I believe, CentOS 4.1, the fuser command had some weird and extraneous debugging text appear on stdout or stderr when the "-n" option was used. Just a piece of a word, with a ":" after it, followed by the expected process id list. Looked quite confusing on the screen. I reported it, and included the trivial patch, but it was not immediately fixed because existing installations could very well have workarounds in scripts in place which could break if the bug was fixed mid-release. Actually, I don't think it was fixed in the 4.2 either, as they said that they already had enough changes going into that for one update.
Such things can be a slight bummer and force one to apply workarounds. But I very *rarely* have a nightly CentOS server yum update surprise me unpleasantly or unexpectedly.
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Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld) Posted Aug 29, 2008 7:02 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
Yes, they can be conservative about change. I'm OK with that, usually. The thing that gets me is that the RedHat guys seem to have a habit of ignoring bugs filed against previous releases. So what happens is the bug gets put off during stable and ignored when they rev the version.
For one example: I had a bug report filed way back in 2000 against RedHat's customized versions of useradd,passwd,chsh,etc. Later I saw someone else file a bug for the exact same problem in 2004! No one had fixed it. The bug was still open, filed against RH 7.3. RH 8 and 9 and AS2.1 had come and gone in the meantime.
There was another one against mkinitrd that I remember. I looked at the changelog a couple years later and that problem had been fixed, purely by accident I believe. The bug hadn't been closed.
If only they'd read their Bugzilla from 2001 I bet they'd find a lot of things to fix.
Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld) Posted Aug 29, 2008 15:07 UTC (Fri) by charlieb (subscriber, #23340) [Link]
> The thing that gets me is that the RedHat guys seem to have a habit of
> ignoring bugs filed against previous releases.
That's probably true of nearly every busy software distributor.
> If only they'd read their Bugzilla from 2001 I bet they'd find a
That's also probably true of nearly every busy software distributor. It's an expensive process to re-triage every old bug report against every new version of software. Squeaky wheels get the oil.
Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld) Posted Aug 29, 2008 17:10 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
"Squeaky wheels get the oil."
I guess that's a problem when developers file bugs. I had already fixed my problems and built customized RPMs, so I had no reason to be squeaky.
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