On Bugs and Linux Quality

[Null Ack]

I would like to respond to Dan's comments about Linux/Ubuntu quality. To not
dilute the discussion on my specific bug Ive moved it over here.

Like all of you, I share the enthusiasm for Linux and open source software.
To me, the greatest features are the ability to see the inner mechanisms of
the software, for not just security reasons ( which is a compelling reason
all in itself) but also for the ability to understand / change core
components. However it is vitally important we do not remain critical in a
constructive way to improve the software, or more importantly, improve the
user experience.

I disagree with the notion that one bug should not effect the global
perception of Ubuntu quality. The point is, for software to be generally
useful, an expected level of robustness and capability is generally expected
in core features. If a bug prevents this from happening then the software is
not generally useful, or at the very least, is not very usable without
protracted workarounds and other annoyances.

Ubuntu has a number of flawed approaches to release management and support.
For example, not updating the Nvidia 169.12 driver in Hardy. 169.12 has
numerous oopses and other bugs, and there subsequently has been three
revisions of the driver since. Not to mention the old driver revision does
not support new Nvidia cards that have been released. Or lets look at the
many, many other device driver fixes in the vanilla kernel tree that have
not been backported into Hardy's old kernel revision. Its wishful thinking
to somehow arbitarily declare that a release is "stable" and then hardly do
any device driver updates ongoing in the "support" phase. Clearly the word
support isnt actual support - I think its more driven by a lack of resources
to upgrade the baseline as is commonly done in Vista and Leopard.

Ubuntu has tens of thousands of bugs in the bug database. Reporting bugs
does not ensure that the bug is actually fixed or indeed investigated at
all. Of those that are, many of those are sent up stream where they again
sit like a statue and not seem to be resolved.

It doesnt take much of a look at say X for example, to see the countless
people complaining about X bugs that have not been fixed. Or, how X was
"released" and declared "stable" with a known blocker and other bugs that
could be argued to actually be blockers as well.

Lets look at what the insiders are saying. A kernel hacker recently said
"I'll typically read the linux-kernel list in 1000-email batches once every
few days and each time I will come across multiple bug reports which are one
to three days old and which nobody has done anything about! And sometimes I
*know* that the person who is responsible for that part of the kernel has
read the report" He continues on answering a question about the declining
quality of Linux "I used to think it was in decline, and I think that I
might think that it still is. I see so many regressions which we never fix.
Obviously we fix bugs as well as add them, but it is very hard to determine
what the overall result of this is.When I'm out and about I will very often
hear from people whose machines we broke in ways which I'd never heard about
before. I ask them to send a bug report (expecting that nothing will end up
being done about it) but they rarely do.So I don't know where we are and I
don't know what to do. All I can do is to encourage testers to report bugs
and to be persistent with them, and I continue to stick my thumb in
developers' ribs to get something done about them.I do think that it would
be nice to have a bugfix-only kernel release. One which is loudly publicised
and during which we encourage everyone to send us their bug reports and
we'll spend a couple of months doing nothing else but try to fix them. I
haven't pushed this much at all, but it would be interesting to try it once.
If it is beneficial, we can do it again some other time." His name is Andrew
Morton.......

Linux needs to have less scatterbrain behaviour where half done things are
left and the chaos moves forward to the next semi complete feature. It needs
to consolidate and have a unified effort to really work on stability and bug
fixing.
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