Word of thanks to the kernel developers

[Richard Kleeman]

Well I have to disagree with you here. If a whole bunch of bugs are 
causing a distro user base major problems and creating bad publicity 
then that should be the concern of the distro producer.

I agree that it is (very) bad if bugfixes by redhat do not make it 
upstream but I see nothing wrong with Canonical helping with the overall 
kernel development process. After all my understanding is that for 
similar reasons many companies (eg IBM) now allow their employees to 
make such contributions and that this is a major help to linux overall.

Mark Shuttleworth has made a particular point of saying Ubuntu should 
give back to the upstream (and Debian in particular) community. I would 
think that kernel help would fall into the same category.

Richard



James Laver wrote:
> See, it's not really canonical's job. The kernel should generally be
> left to the maintainers as much as possible. It's bad enough with
> redhat messing about submitting thousands of patches, while it's good
> that they're fixing bugs, it's harder to keep track of everything,
> especially when they just patch their own sources and don't submit
> them for inclusion in the kernel.
> 
> --James Laver
> 
> On 16/06/06, Richard Kleeman <kleeman at cims.nyu.edu> wrote:
>> Virtually all my serious bug reports in the last 18 months have been
>> kernel related. I agree that many people don't enjoy the work and that
>> may be the nub of the problem here. But then the really worthwhile
>> things in life are always challenging...
>>
>> I am thinking structurally and practically here. I had a laptop that
>> would not work with Dapper until one week from release. This prevented
>> me from reporting several very annoying bugs until after the final 
>> release.
>>
>> There have been several stories about Dapper being buggy from quite
>> respectable sources since the release (e.g. Carla Schroder of Linux
>> Cookbook fame). I feel more attention to the show stopping kernel bugs
>> would help prevent bad publicity like this.
>>
>> I wish I could contribute but being a college professor does not leave
>> much free time I'm afraid, besides which I think Canonical should do the
>> job here since the task is so mission critical.
>>
>>
>>
>> James Laver wrote:
>> > Kernel training takes a long time, and a lot of people don't enjoy it,
>> > so I'm sure you can appreciate that getting kernel developers isn't
>> > the easiest of things.
>> >
>> > Of course you could always volunteer if you've got any programming
>> > experience. We can only hope the kernel bugfix cycle will be
>> > successful
>> >
>> > Besides, i'd personally rather see improvements on applications :)
>> >
>> > --James Laver
>> >
>> > On 15/06/06, Richard Kleeman <kleeman at cims.nyu.edu> wrote:
>> >> Two networking problems I was having which prevented both freenx and
>> >> gnome-cups-tool from working were solved in the latest kernel 
>> 2.6.15-25
>> >> because the sky2 driver was updated to v1.4. This is very much
>> >> appreciated by the end user.
>> >>
>> >> Ubuntu needs more kernel hackers IMHO. Kernel bugs are particularly
>> >> nasty because usually they are show-stoppers. Too many of them 
>> prevents
>> >> the full testing of other software.
>> >>
>> >> /rant
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> ubuntu-devel mailing list
>> >> ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
>> >> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>> -- 
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>>
> 
>