LTS and release methodology

[Neal McBurnett]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 10:24:46AM -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 10:16 AM, Peteris Krisjanis <pecisk at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 1:48 PM, Vincenzo Ciancia <ciancia at di.unipi.it> wrote:
> >>> 2) What about adding some basic hardware testing to these test cases?
> >>> For example, vga out support never survives a release or two before
> >>> being killed by X progressing, in my experience, but it is very
> >>> important for the whole academic community which is one of the primary
> >>> targets of linux-based environments at the moment. As of now, I own
> >>> three different laptops, of different ages. For different bugs none of
> >>> them can project on a VGA projector in hardy, and ALL of them have been
> >>> able in past releases. This gives a very bad impression of ubuntu to
> >>> newcomers.
[snip]
>  Then take into account
> the drivers.  If he's using a closed source driver, it could be the
> driver's fault, and how would we prove that?  And if it's Nvidia, good
> luck getting them to respond to a bug report telling them that their
> newer drivers broke VGA out.

I'd like to address the responsibility of the hardware manufactures as
a major aspect of the problem.  It is important for us to test and
report bugs to Ubuntu and the xorg folks.  But it is also important
for us to report issues to the hardware manufacturers and tell them
we'd like them to do open source development and testing if they want
folks to buy their hardware.  If we all think "they'll just ignore me"
than no one will write to them and they'll think it isn't an issue.

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/