A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

>> I am referring to rather embarrassing and obvious bugs like Network 
>> Manager in Gnome that required expert intervention in releases. 
>> Installing Ubuntu 7.04/7.10 but then having to talk my then colleague 
>> through the terminal on the phone to fix the problem does not leave a 
>> very good image of Ubuntu.
>>
>> Stuff like that should have been nailed in the Release Candidates and 
>> never released.
>>     
>
> I don't remember the details, so can't comment on them specifically. We
> spend the last couple of weeks of a release cycle doing very little else
> but testing, and we try very hard to make sure that problems encountered
> during testing are dealt with where it's at all possible to do so
> (tracking them via http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/ and the iso-testing tag on
> bugs). Of course, it does happen that problems slip through that affect
> only a subset of people; sometimes they actually didn't come up during
> testing at all, and sometimes they did but we just weren't able to fix
> them in time and had to resort to workarounds to minimise their effects.
>
> When this sort of thing hits you, of course it's natural to say "oh,
> those Ubuntu folks, they couldn't be bothered to test and fix things". I
> don't blame you for that. I'm simply here to say that that is not the
> way it works. We make frequent calls for more involvement in pre-release
> testing so that it isn't just a small number of regular testers
> involved.
>
>   
I don't remember the details either. What I do remember is being told on 
the list that the blasted problem package was a gnome thing and that 
that particular package had no maintainer. So it is not Ubuntu 
specific...just that the package got bundled alone with the rest of 
gnome into the release. Which really is not on and gives the impression 
that Ubuntu cannot deliver on quality whatever the reason maybe.
>> Besides bugs, there are other issues. I had eight computers I was hoping 
>> to use as a pilot. Well, now I am down to one machine because Debian 
>> Installer does not have sufficient documentation to tell me how to do 
>> automatically do raid and lvm besides having to familiarize myself with 
>> what looks like hundreds of variables. Automated tools for installation 
>> and package management are very important for big deployments and I am 
>> now seriously rethinking my adversity to Fedora since things in Ubuntu 
>> land seem pretty much the same. There goes my hope of putting Ubuntu on 
>> the desktops instead of Windows...and Promethean just released 
>> ActivInspire on Linux too although they have missed 64-bit packages. 
>> Better documentation would have helped me a long way with the roll out 
>> of the pilot. Hitting the lists offered me no help at all. The best 
>> response I got was that it was possible but I got no reply when I asked 
>> for documentation on how to get it done.
>>     
>
> I won't take responsibility for every single mailing list post being
> answered correctly, but you should have been pointed to the installation
> guide (https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/installation-guide/i386/) whose
> preseeding appendix does document how to do LVM or RAID partitioning.
> That said, LVM *and* RAID partitioning (i.e. LVM on top of RAID) is a
> common request that the automatic partitioning software can't quite
> handle yet. I'm getting hammered on this from a number of directions, so
> there's likely to be work on this for 9.10.
>   
Oh...so lvm on raid is still a no-no. d-i leaves a lot to be 
desired...but if it is possible to use d-i manually to set raid on 
lvm...what needs doing to make it work automatically? Also, when you say 
there will be work on it for 9.10...are you referring to d-i or the 
ubuntu installer?
> For those who find that preseeding is too complicated, Kickstart
> compatibility is available
> (https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/installation-guide/i386/automatic-install.html).
> It isn't as flexible in various areas, but that's OK since it provides
> an escape hatch so that you can mix and match Kickstart and preseeding.
>
>   
will d-i grok kickstart disk partitioning? if using kickstart files 
means that one still needs to be at the console...it ain't worth it.
>>> As Matt Zimmerman said a while back
>>> (http://mdzlog.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/ubuntu-quality/):
>>>
>>>   When 8.10 is released, as with each previous release, some users will
>>>   be disappointed that it has a bug which affects them.  This is
>>>   regrettable, and I feel badly for affected users each time that I read
>>>   about this, but it is unlikely to ever change.  There will never be a
>>>   release of Ubuntu which is entirely free of bugs, and every
>>>   non-trivial bug is important to someone.
>>>
>>> In the real world, anybody who tells you that their product is free of
>>> bugs (or even free of significant bugs that you're going to care about)
>>> is selling something.
>>>       
>> You can at least ensure that certain basic configuration tools work 
>> before you put them in a release. It gives a very bad image when I have 
>> to walk a person through the terminal running commands to work around a 
>> bug in a configuration tool for a basic need.
>>     
>
> As above, we do test all sorts of things including configuration tools
> and make sure they work. Obviously when something slips through for some
> subset of people the natural conclusion for them is that we didn't
> bother testing configuration tools at all, but that isn't the case. Our
> testing does have holes and we're always trying to improve it, but it is
> not absent by any means.
>
>   
I am sorry that I do not have the time to be a RC tester.
>> There is another thing, though not really Ubuntu specific, that would
>> be great is getting kiosktool ported over to KDE 4.2.
>>     
>
> Not something I know anything about myself, I'm afraid ...
>
>   

I have not been able to find time to go through the kiosktool 1.0 
tarball...and I also heard that the KDE team lost manpower just when qt 
was getting interesting and KDE needing more help. Ah well. I guess 
there is always good OLD Debian...