SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 7:12 UTC (Thu) by mingo (guest, #31122)
In reply to: SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure by dlang
Parent article: SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

repeated statements that it's being shipped with distro X and therefor it should be merged don't work

While i agree with the gist of your posting, i'd like to insert a qualification to this statement: if a piece of out-of-tree code is in a distribution then that certainly strengthens that code, and strengthens the case for upstream inclusion as well.

Especially if a piece of out-of-tree code is included in a big Linux distribution then upstream maintainers do not ignore it. There's reasons why distributions get big, out of the pool of literally hundreds of baby distributions - and technical incompetence is certainly not amongst those reasons.

So upstream kernel maintainers definitely must not ignore cases where a distribution chooses to include a big chunk of out-of-tree code. Distribution developers are often closer to users/customers and feel the pain of user suffering more directly than upstream maintainers.

So distribution developers asking for upstream inclusion is very much material. (And if upstream is being stupid then the requests should be repeated ;-) Many of our best features were first test-driven in distributions.

On the other hand, non-developer users of those distributions asking for inclusion, especially if they lack the technical expertise to make the case for upstream inclusion (and i suspect this was the main case you meant) is certainly counter-productive.

Thanks,

Ingo

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 8:32 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

yes, that was part of the point I was making.

"it works for me" can be a useful posting, especially if a patch hasn't had much coverage, or you have an unusual workload/machine to test it on, but there is a huge difference between "it works for me" and "it works for me so that means that you should merge it". one "it doesn't work for me" will out shout a thousand "it works for me" posts

people 'lobbying' for something tend to not provide the testing that is so useful.

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 28, 2010 15:09 UTC (Mon) by rjw@sisk.pl (subscriber, #39252) [Link]

Well, in fact none of the examples given in the original article are about code submitted by a distribution. All of them, and also the ones from your previous comments, fall into the common category where someone, apparently from the "outside", brings us a feature (not being a device driver) complete with bells and whistles and wants us to take it. People generally don't react well to that, which is not surprising (to me at least).

Moreover, such "complete features" often do much more than is really necessary to address the particular problem their submitters had in mind when they started to work on them. In many cases this "extra stuff" makes them objectionable. In some other cases they attempt to address many different problems with one, supposedly universal, feature which confuses things. It also often happens that the feature submitters are not willing to drop anything or redesign, because of the amount of work it took them to develop their code, so the objections cause the entire feature to be rejected eventually.

Now, if you do something that people are not going to react well to and you give them good technical reasons to object to it, you shouldn't be surprised too much when it fails in the end, should you?