Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 18, 2010 4:54 UTC (Tue) by jwb (guest, #15467)
In reply to: Kees Cook: yay for barriers by rsidd
Parent article: Kees Cook: yay for barriers

The whole thing does seem to reflect badly on Red Hat. Tso seems to be dismissing the possibility of the bug impacting Fedora without actually bothering to check. Then a user goes through the extensive trouble of installing an entire distro just to confirm a test case, discovering that the bug does impact Fedora. This is a useful user behavior and the Fedora project should be overjoyed to have users with this much free time, regardless of the user's employer.

As an aside, the willingness to believe that a bug does not exist in one's favorite distro is widespread in the Ubuntu project, too. It seems like they go through Launchpad every six months and set every bug to the Incomplete state, even if there's no evidence whatsoever that the bug was fixed, and even if he bug report contains complete instructions for reproducing it.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 18, 2010 11:15 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (13 responses)

I agree, the Fedora guys look like complete über-assholes. Their distro has the same bug and they should care and happy that someone reported it.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 18, 2010 11:50 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (10 responses)

>I agree, the Fedora guys look like complete über-assholes

Why? Why does some unflattering comment in an LWN thread make 'Fedora guys look like complete über-assholes'? The actual bugzilla entry doesn't contain any of this mudslinging that everyone's so unhappy about; it all happened here on LWN.

And in fact, the most negative comments I could even find looked like these (from different posters):
>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
and
>Besides which, I'm not sure that's the point - surely the problem is that Canonical is selling people contracts in which they agree to support Ubuntu, despite (apparently) not having the necessary expertise to actually do that. Would you buy a support contract from them if all they're going to do with the hard problems is file a bug with Redhat? That's an awfully expensive way to avoid having to deal with bugzilla.

Those don't even get into my top thousand list of offensive LWN comments.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 18, 2010 12:32 UTC (Tue) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (7 responses)

> Why does some unflattering comment in an LWN thread make 'Fedora guys look like complete über-assholes'?

I believe that the OP is referring to the comments from Theodore T'so that this discussion snowballed out from.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 18, 2010 12:40 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (5 responses)

Err. Ted Tso is a Debian developer and works for Google. If the comment was directed at him, the reference to "Fedora guys" makes no sense and name calling and painting a wide brush makes the criticism rather ironical.

When a upstream bug report was filed, the Fedora maintainer was aware of the problem. A comment on the upstream bug report would have been enough to notify the maintainer. When a downstream bug report was filed, it was closed against the upstream report in Fedora. Meanwhile a fix was pushed to Fedora 13 as an update. As simple as that.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 18, 2010 21:16 UTC (Tue) by mcornils (guest, #50906) [Link] (1 responses)

This sounds quite plausible if you consider only a highly traditional view of bug tracking systems - that they are useful mainly for the maintainers, so that they can track problems once a user has submitted the problem. One of the points Debian as a whole makes is that it is transparent also to its users - bugs will not be hidden. From a (power) user's perspective, I love finding "upstream-forwarded" bugs for my distro - if well maintained, I will find out on which distro releases the bug has been verified, on which versions it has been fixed, a link to an upstream bug tracker (if it exists), possibly with a distro-specific workaround.

I firmly believe this is the way to go - and I did so before: without being paid by any distro, I have still done the same thing as Kees - I found a bug upstream, verified on two distros (even installing one) and reported on those two bug trackers, with a link to the upstream report. Users can then profit from all the advantages mentioned above. If this behavior was incorrect, I would really like to know (and be told by the bug submission guidelines).

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 18, 2010 21:20 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Fedora uses bugzilla, does not hide bugs (with a special exception of limited time for security sensitive bugs if the reporter chooses to do so) and has a CLOSED UPSTREAM resolution and can link and transmit status to other bugzilla's as well.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 20, 2010 12:46 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (2 responses)

Dave Airlie is a Red Hat guy, yes?

http://airlied.livejournal.com/72817.html, and it _makes_ him look like an a**hole when one learns about the whole story.

FTR: I use neither RHEL, Fedora, nor Ubuntu on my company or personal systems, and I'm not involved with Linux development on that layer. (My OSS contribution is TeX software development since 1982.) So I don't consider myself biased.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 20, 2010 20:49 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

I've only met briefly him once, a long time ago, but airlied seemed a nice guy. This isn't about his blog entry, nor even about RedHat or Canonical particularly.

It's just generally about the sub-surface tensions that can arise when multiple commercial organisations have to co-operate on some large, shared code-base. The question is how it should be addressed (if at all)?

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 20, 2010 21:35 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Actually, for me it's the other way round.

I would never judge a guy only singly a blog entry, but I can judge a blog entry. That's why I wrote "it makes him look like" and not "he is". I don't know how it is and what the tensions are that made him post this really distateful blog entry. Thus, I judge the blog entry and not the guy.

And I have to say that the RH guy (who's name I have forgotten) who made the snide remark in RH's bugzilla entry reacted great: He came forward and apologized in Kees' blog for jumping to wrong conclusion. That's the professional way to address it.

And here I come to your question: IMNSHO, there is no silver bullet that makes us handle these situations in all cases or even prevent them. The whole point is how we handle them *when* (not if) they happen. Then the principals in such a conceived conflict must step back and revisit their positions. (As Kees did in his comment to his own blog as well, btw. I was very impressed by that, that's seldom.)

This is not a new thing. I was active in the late-80s in X server development, when the switch from X10 to X11 happened. This was very much dominated by commercial players at this time, the Unix turf wars were going on. Snide remarks about each other's company abounded. XFree86 was a very small player then. Well, my 30 years of involvement in free software has teached me that improvements of flame wars' aftermath handling is much more important than mailing list's code of conducts or such in the first place. Normally, you don't loose contributors by flame wars, they Just Happen(tm). We loose them if tensions are allowed to be continued on a personal level and we need to speak up against that as a community if it happens continually.

FWIW, my 0.02 EUR

Joachim

PS: Not that I consider this a flame war, it's more a storm in the teapot. r.a.sf-lovers split, *that* was a flame war... :-) :-) :-)

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 19, 2010 9:15 UTC (Wed) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link]

It's not just Ted but there were some snarky comments from a few personal blogs like Dave Airlie's

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 20, 2010 12:42 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (1 responses)

Who said anything about an "unflattering comment in an LWN thread"?

Probably it's more something like http://airlied.livejournal.com/72817.html, and AFAICS Dave Arilie is a RH employee.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 20, 2010 15:39 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>Who said anything about an "unflattering comment in an LWN thread"?

Kees did, in the very post this article is about. It's the topic in question.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 18, 2010 12:23 UTC (Tue) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (1 responses)

> [the Fedora guys] should care and happy that someone reported it.

I believe almost everybody hates upstream bugs being filed in Fedora's bugzilla.

* Upstreams prefer them to be filed in their own bug tracker.
* Package maintainers prefer to only handle packaging bugs. If they do handle bugs in the software per se, they usually do so within the upstream community so it makes sense for the bug to be in the upstream bug tracker.
* Users get annoyed because they believe developers to be passing themselves the buck and/or fear the bug will get lost in the shuffle.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 18, 2010 21:32 UTC (Tue) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

Yep. In Fedora, the standard way to say just as a heads up, heres an upstream issue that affects your package is out of band. In Debian, you file a bug with Tags: upstream and a pointer to the upstream bug. I am not so familiar with Ubuntus processes, but I suspect this link might help.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Responses#A%20bug%20that%20s...