Do you really want developers to be on this list was (Re: Very bad status of hardware (especially wifi) support in ubuntu, due to the too many accumulated regressions)

[Markus Hitter]

Am 13.11.2008 um 10:32 schrieb Stephan Hermann:

> But reality told me different.

Stephan, your points about the unfortunate truth are valid.  
Nevertheless, software quality is one of the keys to success.

I've just filed the second bug where one of the Gnome applets  
segfaults in a standard situation. Many developers obviously code  
really sloppy, a la "it worked once in my situation, so it works  
always in all situations". Some developers even consider a segfault  
as a normal way to end the execution of an application. This is a  
more general observation of mine, this is ridiculous.

While we can't "fix" developers, we can put more automatic helpers  
into place:

  - Keep Apport enabled even on stable releases. Hiding bugs doesn't  
help.

While this doesn't fix bugs by it's self, it greatly helps to fix  
them after the fact (and timely educate developers about their  
practices).

Additionally, this opens the door to get some automatic measure about  
the quality of drivers or other software. Count open bugs and you  
know what you roughly can expect. If you count too many of them, drop  
the hardware in the compatibility list.

To keep more users happy:

  - Allow downgrades. This should help narrowing potential causes of  
the trouble.


Ideally, there would be a big regression testing facility, like Wine  
has one. Each time a Wine developer fixes a bug, he's pushed to  
create a test for his case. These test cases are run automatically  
for each commited patch and pretty well avoid introducing a bug a  
second time.


to add my $o.o2,
MarKus

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/