Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 19, 2010 11:00 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669)
In reply to: Kees Cook: yay for barriers by seyman
Parent article: Kees Cook: yay for barriers

packaged software diverges from upstream. It's entirely plausible that a problem that a Fedora (or whatever) user encounters in a package is *not* an upstream problem, and it's a judgement call (on the behalf of the packager) to determine whether that is the case, on a per-bug basis. It is not the responsibility of the user to know the internals of the package, whether or how much it has diverged from upstream, etc.

Also a bug might be an upstream issue but only triggered in a distribution due to an interaction with another component.

I disagree that it is a waste of time to track a bug in two places. It makes sense to *fix* it upstream, if that's where it occurs, and for that fix to trickle down into the distro as part of packaging more recent updates. But again, that's all the packagers job, not the users.

Kees Cook: yay for barriers

Posted May 19, 2010 13:25 UTC (Wed) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

I really like the launchpad approach: an issue can be relevant to more than one software project and/or to more than one operating system or distribution. Launchpad integrates with other bug trackers to automatically update statuses. Tracking an issue on launchpad is separate from being responsible for fixing the issue.

Here is a recent example: there was a bug in binutils and... well, it would take a while to type in the whole story, but you can see from this launchpad page that it would be a pain in the neck to keep track of this issue across all the open source projects that it touches just by bouncing back and forth among all their trackers:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/binutils/+bug/4...

Note that this issue -- 461303 -- affects Fedora, Ubuntu, and an upstream just like the issue that is the subject of this LWN.net story does. I don't think that there is a launchpad ticket for that latter issue. If there were I could tell at a glance which distros have this bug and which releases have fixed it and how they did so...