Two rather negative articles about Ubuntu

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 17:25 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> 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.
> 

Usually this is enough to get started.  We then ask them for the output
of a few simple commands, and that's enough to better understand the
problem.

It would certainly be useful if an automated tool in Ubuntu could gather
this info.

> > > 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'm assuming that a system for pushing Ubuntu bug reports upstream will
be instituted soon ;-)

> I would say that such bug reports are only marginally more useful
> upstream, though.

I do think it's useful, even if most of these users won't be able to
help at all to debug the problem.  Ubuntu has a huge user base, *any*
info we can get from them to help identify driver issues is useful.

Lee