Shining more light on the problem [LWN.net]

Shining more light on the problem

Posted Aug 23, 2006 2:05 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
In reply to: Shining more light on the problem by dowdle
Parent article: Who maintains RPM?

I credit Red Hat for acknowledging the problem with a named individual...

Well I don't. This wasn't the first episode -- pressing Ctrl+C when running RPM once upon a time corrupted the database too. We were a paying customer and submitted a bug report. A similar level of lack of ownership and vitriol was displayed by the developer.

This was a showstopper bug for a production billing system. His supervisor didn't appear to take any action. There seemed to be no automated escalation. There seemed to be no level of management that would act upon our complaints and escalate the issue to a more capable developer. The local Red Hat office advised us that they had no influence. The resolution dragged on and on and was eventually to prevent Ctrl+C having any effect upon RPM. Of course that meant that any runaway RPM process could only be stopped with kill -9, which would of course corrupt the database.

I can't think of any other software company that would have allowed this sort of behaviour from an employee for such an extended period of time. It doesn't surprise me at all that other RPM bugs struck similar issues.

It is sad that so much effort was put into nagging at him rather than someone just fixing it and submitting a patch.

No. If we wanted that we'd use Debian. We pay Red Hat so that they take ownership of problems. If a Fedora user reports a showstopper problem we expect it to be addressed before it effects our applications running on RHEL. That's why we're happy to have our payments for RHEL used to subsidise the Fedora distribution.

Red Hat software maintenance is often more expensive than Solaris, AIX or Cisco -- and they include hardware maintenance too. We expect a level of service which matches the scale of those payments.

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Shining more light on the problem

Posted Aug 23, 2006 9:55 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

Ouch! If I got a corrupt database everytime I hit Ctrl-C while running dpkg, I'd be pretty pissed.

Dpkg may not be perfect, but it's never ever corrupted it's database on me, and I've beaten it pretty badly over the years.

Shining more light on the problem

Posted Aug 23, 2006 16:22 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (1 responses)

That was a bug from long ago... and the rpm database could be repaired by using the rebuild flag. They fixed that the bug.

I'd rather not see this discussion digress into an rpm vs. dpkg thing.

Shining more light on the problem

Posted Aug 23, 2006 17:04 UTC (Wed) by anonymous21 (guest, #30106) [Link]

Let's correct that:

... the rpm database could be repaired (sometimes) by using the rebuild option...

RPM was always a fearful tool for me.

Although it has probably vastly improved since then. (redhat 6,7,8)

Mark

Shining more light on the problem

Posted Aug 23, 2006 16:19 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

I'm confused. There needs to be some sort of timeline here.

RPM reporting on Red Hat's bugzilla was part of the confusion... as the open project was using the commercial vendor's bugzilla for bug tracking. Were bugs reported for the open project or for the vendor? Bugzilla *IS NOT* the Red Hat Support system and anyone using it for that is spinning their wheels.

When was Jeff Johnson working as a Red Hat employee and when was he NOT? Were his responses in bugzilla an official part of his Red Hat job or part of the open project?

See, lots of room for confusion.

Shining more light on the problem

Posted Aug 24, 2006 8:33 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link]

[...] We were a paying customer and submitted a bug report. [...]

Bugzilla is not a support system. From the front page of the Red Hat Bugzilla:

Bugzilla is not an avenue for technical assistance or support, but simply a bug tracking system.

I think that makes it pretty clear.