logging bugs for pre-release versions
Patrick Goetz
pgoetz at mail.utexas.edu
Tue Mar 9 21:01:44 UTC 2010
Having abandoned Karmic, I've been installing Lucid Alpha 3 on a number
of different systems, mostly for testing, and am finding lots of bugs.
For example, on an old Acer Aspire 3000 laptop, after a completely
generic Alpha 3 install + or - up to March 8 daily updates:
1. The console driver is broken: vt1-vt6 only display 13.5 characters
(yes, I meant 13 and one half characters).
2. X works fine, but will sometimes come up on vt7, other times on vt8
-- I haven't been able to determine a pattern.
3. There is a timing problem with logging in on the gdm console: the
first attempt to login always fails, the second always succeeds --
unless I wait 4-5 minutes before attempting to log in, in which case the
first login attempt succeeds (usually).
For mission critical issues I will take the time to carefully file a bug
report on launchpad, but for stuff like this I just don't have time. For
example, I have no idea what package to associate the console graphics
problem with and don't really have time to find out. What I want to be
able to do is have some place to state the build I'm installing,
describe the hardware I'm installing it on (e.g. this system has an SIS
M760GX graphics chip and an AMD Sempron processor), and then list the
problems I'm having and done, back to work. The someone more
knowledgeable than me can parse and triage the issues to the right
package maintainers. ubuntu-bug doesn't work this way AFAIK (no idea
how I'd use it with the problems described above), and apport isn't
doing it for me. After one login (I've been turning the machine on and
off a lot trying to narrow down the specific list of problems), a dialog
box popped up announcing that some serious kernel panic had occurred,
that the system was now unstable, and would I like to report a bug to
"help the developers"? Sure, why not. Apport then proceeded to ask me
a series of questions not even Linus could answer: e.g., "is this bug
similar to any of these bugs?" How would I know? The only information
I have is a dialog box telling me the kernel panicked -- I don't have
any information. I've been using linux for 15 years; now imagine
throwing these dialogs at some neophyte. This is bound to do more harm
than good, since the experience is surreal, to say the least.
Assuming no one is available to parse these multi-bug reports, I could
probably write a perl script in a couple of days that would search
through them looking for keywords and then alert specific package
maintainers based on topics they've registered to trigger an alert. SJ
Remnant could write an event driven version in an hour. It seems to me
that for pre-release code, where users/testers are likely to find
multiple problems, it should be made as easy as possible to report these
problems.
Also, please don't suggest the ubuntu+1 IRC, this is beyond completely
useless.
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