Comments on: Please Report Bugs Upstream

By: EastFilters

EastFilters — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:24:59 +0000

http://www.eastfilters.com
Auto Filters, Replacement Elements For Fuel Filters, Turbine Fuel Filters, Replacement for Fuel Filters, Air Filters, Filter Water Separators, Fuel Purification Systems, Engine Fuel Filters, Gasoline Engine Fuel Filter, Diesel Engine Fuel Filter, Trailer Engine Fuel filter, Engine Fuel filter, Car Filter, auto fuel filters, Truck Fuel Filter and Motor Yacht parts.

By: Mekk

Mekk — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:27:31 +0000

Well… I think whoever wants to work fixing bugs, should be supported and praised, wherever he or she does it.

I reported plenty of bugs, issues and improvement suggestions upstream in the past. Some bugs I reported back in early 2000-s still can be found in KDE, Gnome, Evolution, Mozilla and other bugzilla’s. Some were closed without being solved or tested (for example KDE guys thrown away plenty of bug reports because KDE4 is new and old bugs are no longer relevant). Some happened to be revived many years after being reported (like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=225680 from 2003 which found developer interest when Chrome arrived)

That’s also understandable, people have limited time. Especially to fix bugs they can’t easily reproduce.

The questions whether it is better to report bug to Ubuntu, or to – say – Gnome team should in fact be rephrased as which of these teams is more likely to take a look.

By: Rufus Polson

Rufus Polson — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:53:11 +0000

Hmmm . . . I’m no programmer so I’m probably far out in left field here. But I’d say . . .
OK, no matter how the “lots of bug trackers” problem is tackled it will be very very hard. However, I don’t think “One super-big directory” is the way to go. Maybe something more along the lines of the decentralized/distributed version control systems.

By: darkhole

darkhole — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:37:50 +0000

I really like this idea.. But, I don’t like to have all this big amount of accounts for every bug report site..
Sourceforge
Fedora
Launchpad
Debian
Mozilla
Gnome
KDE
Independence..
etc..

I don’t like this.. Maybe we must think in one “super big” directory with all this bugs in FLOSS.

PDT: Now I have a Launchpad account.. But I created it because it was a requisite to be a member of my Ubuntu Local Team….

By: oiaohm

oiaohm — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:35:12 +0000

Solution is not just reporting upstream.

Distrobutions are poor at working with each other as well. This is a complex design problem.

Bug trackers were not created to cope with decentralized world that Distrobutions create.

If there was some way to have a unified bug tracker. That could cross reference all distrobutions with the same bug this could be highly useful. Somethings this would point out the source of the defective patch.

Design this is a major problem.

By: Joseph Smidt

Joseph Smidt — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:16:09 +0000

@effiejayx:
That’s the type of bug reporting I like to see. Even the patch was sent upstream. Great work.

By: effiejayx

effiejayx — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:06:29 +0000

I speak as a new contributor to Ubuntu and we are very much encourage to participate with upstream. if you need examples of tools that help, check out this bug with “Bug watcher Updater” that keep track of this bug after I report them in the different BTS ( Debian BTS and SorceForge) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tsclient/+bug/63412.

Also the reference from someone using fedora lets me know that it is safe to do a package upgrade for tsclient, eventhough upstream still lists the latest as UNSTABLE. So, high five to that fedora user.

By: Joseph Smidt

Joseph Smidt — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:03:22 +0000

@mdz
I really appreciate your comments and can tell you have lots of wisdom in this regard. Man, if you could get a discussion at Linux Plumbers on this I think you would do the Linux community a *HUGE* service. To me, it’s little things like this that will end up making all the difference.

By: mdz

mdz — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:54:26 +0000

There is more to this than can be summed up in a few words. It is not a simple problem to solve.

Distribution developers know better than anyone the costs involved in carrying distro-specific patches, and that the fewer there are, the better. The fact that they exist anyway indicates that there is a more subtle problem at work here.

That said, there are steps which could be taken (both upstream and in distributions) which would improve things. I don’t think we’re likely to see a sea change, though, until there is a common understanding on both sides.

Linux Plumbers might be a good opportunity for a group discussion on it…

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:47:09 +0000

3 words:

distributed bug tracking

and another 8 words:

treat every distro specific patch as a bug

If every distro would adhere to those 11 words we would be in a much better world, because there would be less patches because maintaining them would require more energy and bugs and code would live in synergy.

Sad thing is we are at least 3 years away from something remotely similar.