Two rather negative articles about Ubuntu

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 08:22:33PM -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 16:07 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 04:55:23PM -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> > > I can tell you now what's causing the problem, incomplete hardware
> > > driver support.  "No sound on $LAPTOP_MODEL" is absolutely a useful bug
> > > report if it includes the exact make and model of the affected
> > > hardware.  
> > 
> > Not necessarily; we don't know which sound device a particular laptop has,
> 
> lspci and the codec related files under /proc/asound can tell you.

"No sound on $LAPTOP_MODEL" doesn't, however.  That's not a useful bug
report on its own.

> > and even if we did, knowing the device and that it doesn't work isn't enough
> > information to do anything about the problem unless we already know the
> > cause.
> 
> It might not seem that it helps, but trust me, it is useful information
> for driver developers.
>
> > Users who submit bug reports like this must be willing to participate in
> > debugging efforts to find the problem, and this is rarely practical unless
> > the user has sufficient knowledge and skill to do much of that work on their
> > own.
> 
> Maybe it's not a useful Ubuntu bug report, but it's useful for ALSA.
> The ALSA developers probably have access to less than 1% of the hardware
> that's supported, it helps just to know whose sound doesn't work.

I thought you were talking about Ubuntu bug reports, not upstream bug
reports.  I would say that such bug reports are only marginally more useful
upstream, though.

-- 
 - mdz