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smoke screen?smoke screen?Posted Oct 1, 2008 17:56 UTC (Wed) by s0f4r (guest, #52284)Parent article: Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report
This feels like a bit of a hastily put-together smoke screen for the publicity effect. It's unfortunate since it will yet again put the ubuntu users up against the upstream developers more, after all the flame blogging that has been going on recently.
Greg KH righteously slapped canonical in the face and told them to get their act together and fix the process. Maybe it was not polite, but it was based on indisputable numbers. I don't care how much ubuntu contributes to gnome personally. gnome != linux. Ubuntu would switch away from gnome to something else if it could in a jiffie.
This project aims at showing how well ubuntu is forwarding bugs upstream without actually helping upstream at all. The net effect is that ubuntu users will even more get the idea that upstream is the problem and causing their bugs, while ubuntu can sit at the sideline passing the blame.
<sarcasm>
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smoke screen? Posted Oct 1, 2008 18:16 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] If Ubuntu contributed nothing to the kernel but contributed big-time to Gnome and freedesktop.org projects, that would still be a huge service. While it wouldn't help those who are only interested in Linux as a server or embedded OS, it would still be a big contribution.However, upstream shouldn't be asked to deal with Lauchpad; Ubuntu contributors to upstream should deal with making sure that bug reports are handled properly in upstream projects' bug-tracking systems (likewise for other distros).
smoke screen? Posted Oct 2, 2008 3:54 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
When a bug watch has been added in Launchpad, it means someone has triaged the distribution bug report and either (a) linked it to an existing bug in the upstream or (b) filed a bug upstream and linked to that. When this is working correctly, the upstream developer wouldn't be required to look directly at Launchpad (but could if they wanted to).
This is basically the same way Debian maintainers interact with upstream, but with a bit more automation of communication with upstream bug trackers (and more automation planned for the future).
The report gives a good indication of how well that process is going.
smoke screen? Posted Oct 2, 2008 5:23 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Debian has bts-link, which basically does the same thing, but without the report:
smoke screen? Posted Oct 2, 2008 5:33 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
Sounds cool. I wonder if the Launchpad plugins for Trac and Bugzilla could be extended to allow bts-link to communicate with them?
smoke screen? Posted Oct 1, 2008 18:31 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I think I need to give Ubuntu the benefit of the doubt with regard to this.
Metrics are important. Everybody could probably be doing a better job on metrics. This maybe be a valuable first step for Ubuntu to get their head around their upstream interaction and start to build a process to push patches more directly.
What I am more concerned about is the fact that this is yet another piece of functionality which is deeply tied to launchpad, and thus not a tool that can be easily propagated in a way that others can use and more importantly extend.
Even if Ubuntu doesn't know how to turn the corner and make effective use of this sort of reporting to get patches moving upstream, other groups may, or may be able to extend launchpad with better upstream patching support so that launchpad becomes more of a two-way communication conduit. It's unfortunately that Canonical continues to keep their most powerful community interaction tools as implemented as part of launchpad...closed.
Would there be benefit to everyone, both Ubuntu and upstream, if launchpad were openly developed such that people could begin incorporating direct upstream patch forwarding? Like how transifex does things for translations. Canonical's failed to provide those sort of direct upstream interaction features that transifex provides, even though the Ubuntu translation community has been asking for this sort of support for years now. And since launchpad isn't open, the community can't dig in and extend the launchpad functionality for themselves.
And now we have the new metric reporting. It's actually sort of cool, and its actually still not open to be extended, as far as I know. You know, maybe there are community people out there who have the desire and the understanding of upstream project processes that Canonical lacks. Hell, maybe those people are in the current Ubuntu using community. And maybe if launchpad were opened right now, this very second, those people would be able to dig in and extend launchpad specifically to include the direct upstream patch forwarding interactions in a way that makes sense and could be tied to the metrics reporting. But Canonical built launchpad in the way that they did specifically to centralize control into Canonical's hands and did not include a facility to push upstream directly.
So as a result, if others see value in this sort of metric reporting and want to also track upstream patch forwarding, they will have to re-invent the wheel completely, instead of being able to start with launchpad as it is and extend it. What this shows is that Canonical continues to want sole control over what community interaction means, for everybody.
Anyone hear anything newer than August 28th concerning an approved roadmap for opening Launchpad? All the references I have found pre-date the Aug. 28th bug ticket comment stating that the roadmap was not approved yet.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad-foundations/+bug/506...
-jef
smoke screen? Posted Oct 2, 2008 4:22 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] Interacting with upstream trackers is a difficult process. If done wrong, it is very easy to shift from being considered a useful service to being considered spam. So any automated system that started sending automated unsolicited messages to all the community's bug trackers would probably get blocked pretty quickly. So at present Ubuntu bugs are generally manually forwarded upstream by a human. Once you rule out unsolicited forwarding, the other option is for upstreams to opt in. If they want this, then some plugins were recently made available to help here. At the moment, the plugins allow for comments to bugs to be pushed in both directions for linked bug reports, but in future could allow some level of automation to forwarding bugs upstream (you'd probably still want some human involvement, so massive numbers of duplicates on the distro side don't flood the upstream tracker).
smoke screen? Posted Oct 1, 2008 18:31 UTC (Wed) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]
For a linux kernel developer to complain about any other project's bug tracker is ironic indeed. The standard linux-kernel response to any bug report, no matter how obvious and serious, is as follows. "Could you please test 2.6.42-rc2-pre6-mm17+git20080909153242.8818?" And although the kernel has its own bugzilla, kernel developers seem to ignore it as a policy.
I happen to think Launchpad is very helpful both to developers and users. Users think it is a hassle to 1) find the upstream bug tracker, 2) register for an account there, 3) file the bug, and 4) drive the process through to the end. The fourth item is especially true when the upstream has a bug tracking system that they assiduously ignore. It's very frustrating to file bugs in GNOME's bugzilla or Freedesktop.org's bugzilla or the linux kernel bugzilla, only to see them rot for years on end. At least when you file them in Launchpad you get a good feel for how the distro managers are dealing with the upstream's defects.
Right now I have 53 bugs in Launchpad and only one of them applies to Ubuntu proper. The rest are all upstream bugs, and from my perspective as a user I'm completely satisfied with Launchpad's ability to drive the resolution upstream.
smoke screen? Posted Oct 2, 2008 8:38 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
> The standard linux-kernel response to any bug report, no matter how obvious and serious, is as follows. "Could you please test 2.6.42-rc2-pre6-mm17+git20080909153242.8818?"
What else could one say? Most kernel bugs are related to specific hardware (that kernel's developers usually don't have).
> And although the kernel has its own bugzilla, kernel developers seem to ignore it as a policy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the kernel's bugzilla an experiment to see if it helped? (and I think some kernel developers thought it was not worth the hassle).
smoke screen? Posted Oct 3, 2008 16:32 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Some developers, if not most, don't find it very amusing to register at Bugzilla, especially since there is no way to easily un- and reregister. For them, and that includes me, mail is so much easier.
smoke screen? Posted Oct 16, 2008 15:30 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]
The kernel bugzilla has certainly worked quite well for me. I've filed
and had fixed several -rc bugs that nobody else seemed to be running into, that may well have made it into the full release were it not for my report... which might not have been filed had I to try to figure out the proper mail interface and rules. At least bugzilla is reasonably familiar for those who run testing and early releases and regularly file bugs elsewhere, thus already knowing a bit about the process, hopefully therefore filing better bugs as a result.
Kernel bugzilla therefore expands the feedback loop, opening it to people
Duncan
Re: Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 1, 2008 18:39 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
> Maybe it was not polite, but it was based on indisputable numbers.
Hmm, weren't the numbers very much disputable? Omitted one of the most obvious numbers, ie. the number of employees in companies, Canonical's 150 (a lot less before) vs. other's thousands. Blaming a small company for their big success is a bit funny. The grandmas and grandpas using Ubuntu cannot be turned into kernel patches.
I find your post a bit trollish, since whatever all the aspects that have been discussed to death, the issue is very disputable and Greg's ramblings very biased-sounding against his employer's competitor. It's about 50% that Canonical has some problems that could be fixed with time and (hopefully) company growth and 50% that Greg has a bit of a problem with rudeness that should not be tolerated in communities since it creates bad spirit.
Regarding the topic, I find it a welcome start to a more fluent upstream handling. I think previously effort and thinking has gone to interacting with Debian, but it's also useful to try to contribute more directly to upstreams.
smoke screen? Posted Oct 1, 2008 18:56 UTC (Wed) by whiprush (subscriber, #23428) [Link]
Hi,
I've been working on this report with Graham Binns for a good portion of this release cycle and it has always been made available at the same public URL. I purposely didn't advertise it much because until recently it wasn't very useful - it is now to a point where it can be useful which is why I blogged about it.
I don't understand where you get the idea that this puts ubuntu users "against" upstream developers, the point of the report is to point out which bug reports are in an upstreamable state so that we can push those to upstream bugtrackers.
--
smoke screen? Posted Oct 1, 2008 19:21 UTC (Wed) by apokryphos (guest, #42130) [Link]
Actually, suggesting that they contribute considerably to GNOME in comparison to other companies instead of the Kernel is _actually_ a smoke screen. Companies like Novell and Red Hat employ significantly more developers to consistently work on GNOME and KDE, so if you did a graph with those contributions comparing the different downstream projects, I doubt there would be much difference at all. For example, SUSE have significantly more developers working on OpenOffice.org alone than entire desktop team at Canonical
Greg KH's speech was quite simply that Ubuntu are not the upstream innovators. Critics who complained that he didn't consider the GNOME projects still do not change this fact, and critics who suggest that Canonical is a smaller company are side-stepping the issue. Launchpad is part of the problem, but one of the main problems IMO is one of erroneous attribution. For example I have seen many Ubuntu users suggesting to others that they created Compiz -- a project that actually cost Novell thousands of dollars.
Companies like Red Hat and SUSE should be getting tremendous credit for consistently paying free software developers to work on the Linux server/desktop day-in-day-out, and this so frequently does not happen.
smoke screen? Posted Oct 1, 2008 20:13 UTC (Wed) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] a project that actually cost Novell thousands of dollars. Might want to count those zero's again....
how many zeroes Posted Oct 1, 2008 21:12 UTC (Wed) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
RH and Novell (and to a lesser but still very significant extent) have invested many millions (probably in the low tens of millions at this point) in GNOME, gtk, X, freedesktop, etc.
how many zeroes Posted Oct 1, 2008 21:14 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I wonder... how much has Canonical sunk into launchpad specifically over the years?
-jef
how many zeroes Posted Oct 2, 2008 19:49 UTC (Thu) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
Hrm, that 'and ____ to a lesser but still significant extent' should have a 'Sun' in the blank there.
smoke screen? Posted Oct 2, 2008 9:17 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> For example I have seen many Ubuntu users suggesting to others that they created Compiz -- a project that actually cost Novell thousands of dollars.
What do a few misinformed users have to do with Canonical or Ubuntu? I've never seen either claim they created Compiz.
smoke screen? Posted Oct 1, 2008 19:49 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] This feels like a bit of a hastily put-together smoke screen for the publicity effect. It's unfortunate since it will yet again put the ubuntu users up against the upstream developers more, after all the flame blogging that has been going on recently. I see it as precisely the opposite. They are effectively putting themselves on public notice, putting their process of communicating with upstream projects in the public view. This not only encourages others to see exactly what and how the Ubuntu developers are communicating, but also encourages other users and developers to get involved with the process, and encourages the Ubuntu people themselves to make sure they do a good job of it. It's a move towards greater transparency and more public participation, the diametric opposite of a smoke screen.
smoke screen? Posted Oct 2, 2008 18:16 UTC (Thu) by jsbarnes (guest, #4096) [Link]
As upstream for one of the Ubuntu packages (xf86-video-intel) I can say
that this is definitely not a smokescreen. My interactions with the Ubuntu packagers have been great. They file good quality bug reports, are conscientious about getting needed info, and often attach patches we can apply directly. That's not to say other distros don't do the same (the Debian, Gentoo and Mandriva guys are also very helpful), but Ubuntu definitely does the right thing here.
Interestingly Fedora/Red Hat don't interact much with our bug system (i.e.
smoke screen? Posted Oct 2, 2008 19:27 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I think this drills down to an important underlying point. Which parties are contributing bits of code into upstream. Isn't that the fundamental friction being expressed?
If Canonical wants to get ahead of the perception problem, they need to be able to track patch flow as well as ticket comment flow. Downstream supplied patched do matter, and may not show up in the the commit stats in the same way that direct developer involvement does. You obviously can't directly compare upstream developer activity done on company time, to volunteer patch submission efforts. So watching how patches come in via a bug tracking interface isn't going to tell the whole story but it may help turn the corner on Canonical's upstream relation issue.
-jef
smoke screen? Posted Oct 2, 2008 19:34 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]
> Ubuntu would switch away from gnome to something else if it could in a jiffie.
(k|x|ed)ubuntu
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