Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 15, 2010 15:54 UTC (Sat) by ewan (guest, #5533)
In reply to: Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity by arjan
Parent article: Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Seriously? Have you got the bug number for that?

Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 15, 2010 15:56 UTC (Sat) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link] (6 responses)

http://airlied.livejournal.com/72817.html

Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 15, 2010 18:17 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (5 responses)

Why is finding and filing a bug similar/the same as one you found elsewhere suddenly "bad practice"? Isn't it good they pointed out the fault also applies to Fedora?

Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 15, 2010 19:32 UTC (Sat) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (4 responses)

> Why is finding and filing a bug similar/the same as one you found elsewhere suddenly "bad practice"?

Because filling in bug reports against 200+ distributions is an immense waste of time, both for the reporter and the people doing triage on the 200+ bug trackers. Once you're able to reproduce the bug with an unpatched upstream, I think it's safe to consider all distributions to be suffering from the problem and filing a bug upstream should be the only thing you need to do.

Note that Fedora has a policy that all upstream bugs should be taken care of in the upstream bug tracker. That's why bugzilla.redhat.com has an UPSTREAM resolution and that's why this bug was closed with this resolution. The only thing filing it accomplished was wasting people's time.

Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 15, 2010 20:38 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

Kees also filed an upstream bug and the very first line of his Fedora bug report points to the kernel.org report, which points again to the Ubuntu bug.

I see your point that the posting to the Fedora bug-tracker was redundant and perhaps wasting people's time, so far as Fedora's processes go. However, it does NOT seem like Kees was trying to sneakily get RedHat to work on Canonicals' bugs. All it looks like is that he's trying to raise awareness amongst the relevant technical people about a fairly serious ext4 performance regression, in an open, technical manner.

So the "Go fix your own vendor bugs, nyeeh nyah!" responses still don't sit quite right with me.

FWIW, I'm a general free Unix/Linux user. The logos and branding on my preferred Linux distro say "Fedora", but the software I use is maintained by engineers/hackers from a *variety* of vendors, including Canonical.

Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 16, 2010 4:18 UTC (Sun) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

While I would never assume that Kees had anything but the best intentions when posting a duplicate to the Fedora issue tracker, its advisable to read over the timing of comments in the launchpad bug to get a feel for what's going on.
2010-03-21 : Launchpad bug filed
2010-04-14 : Comment from Ted Ts'o
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/5436...
2010-05-04 20:36:58 kernel and Fedora bug filed.

I would dare say that Ted's comment actually sort of encouraged, indirectly, Kees to do the additional posting in the hopes of getting Red Hat engineering resources interested in solving the problem on a mutually beneficial timescale.

Though I do sort of have to wonder why it took 3 weeks after Ted Ts'o to confirm it was happening with an upstream kernel for the upstream kernel report to be filed...and only after the Ubuntu specific workaround was found to be insufficient.

-jef

Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 16, 2010 9:12 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

The reason it took 3 weeks appears to be because that's around how long it took Kees to come up with a general-case demonstration of the bug. You really have to stretch a bit to argue that Kees was acting in any way other than as someone trying to work out the technicalities of the bug, and just trying to get other technical people interested in the problem, on that basis alone. And if you look at the upstream bug various people (from various vendors) discussed it.

Isn't part of the benefit of Linux that it provides a way for commercial organisations to work semi-mutually to further the interests of *shared* code.

Again, these accusations appear less than solidly founded. It surely can not be good to start creating an atmosphere where people are afraid to talk to other developers of a project about a bug just because they work for a different vendor.

Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 17, 2010 0:50 UTC (Mon) by bryce (guest, #16388) [Link]

"Again, these accusations appear less than solidly founded. It surely can not be good to start creating an atmosphere where people are afraid to talk to other developers of a project about a bug just because they work for a different vendor."

If you're looking at this and merely seeing evidence at attempts to collaborate, well that's hardly fun and interesting. Try harder to blur the facts around to support some sinister conspiracy theory. That is a LOT more interesting, and sells a lot more ads. This whole talk about thinking from solid foundations is plain silly; everyone knows better than to do that.

But whatever you do, DON'T just go talk to the developer directly to get the actual facts. That makes it a *lot* harder to maintain all the lovingly crafted anti-Canonical memes we've got. Next you'll be saying Kees contributes to upstream or some other madness like that.