Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 16, 2015 23:56 UTC (Fri) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178)
In reply to: Fedora opens up to bundling by roc
Parent article: Fedora opens up to bundling

>That's odd. In my experience, users blame the application when it doesn't work. E.g. when Firefox freezes on a Web page using HTML5 canvas, the user blames Firefox. They do not say "hey, this must be a bug in the system cairo library!" and complain to the cairo developers.

So they complain to their distro Firefox maintainer who does have enough of a clue to say "hey, this is a bug in cairo" and gets it fixed in the library, a fix that solves the problem for everyone, including Firefox, which means one less problem you need to debug and fix yourself in your bundled copy when you get around to updating it.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 18, 2015 19:52 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

It's funny this specific example of graphics libraries is brought up. A friend of mine had a problem with huge rendering corruption all over a simple HTML+CSS page in that browser.

Was it a bug in cairo? The gpu driver? The browser? We'll never know - like any sane person he didn't go through the ordeal of making Yet Another ****ing Bugzilla Account, he switched to Microsoft Edge and the problem vanished.

Similarly, my own quality of life has vastly improved since switching to Vivaldi; no more waiting literally minutes for the browser to open or pages to load. My netbook is *usable* again, imagine that.

And imagine trying to get anywhere by reporting *that* bug to *those* people.

(FWIW, I do make good use of my distro's bug tracker, but I've found trying to contribute to browsers is just an exercise in extreme masochism. It's better to let them fail.)

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 18, 2015 21:33 UTC (Sun) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (2 responses)

That's a fantasy. In reality the user tries Chrome, or the Mozilla Firefox build, both of which use known-to-work bundled libraries, and gets on with life. And maybe tells their friends that Firefox sucks.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 19, 2015 11:54 UTC (Mon) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (1 responses)

So maybe Chrome and Firefox should ensure the libraries are part of a sane environment where upstream-first is the correct way, by _showing example_.

That would be the first time someone says getting fixes upstream is not something sane to do.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 19, 2015 23:14 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

I agree sending fixes upstream is generally a good thing to do. I have not said otherwise.