This needs attention

[Gabor Toth]

Hi,

I feel like I need to say something to this conversation as I found this
subject quite disturbing.  As part of my work I install Ubuntu systems to
customers and use Ubuntu for long years now, having been through almost all
distros of Ubuntu.  I have done some testing too and helped on bug squad
some.  These days did not have that much time to contribute, but I do my
best as you guys.

While the discussion on this forum seems to be a lot of back and forth this
is nothing to what is going on on the actual bug report and forum there.
 Reading it through I do not have a doubt in my mind that this IS an actual
bug even though I am not effected by it.  If one does a dist upgrade and
his system was working before and after the upgrade going through without
any warning it lives him with an unusable (even though fixable) system it
is something you would not expect dist upgrade to do - thus it is a bug,
per definition of a bug.  A part of a system does something that you do not
expect it to do and of course it is quite high priority since en entire
system becomes broken and it apparently effects multiple users.

There is something else quite disturbing though.  There seem to be one
person in the programmer side of the team that keeps disagreeing with the
everyone else and is able to push her own opinion (which seems very wrong
by the way) in front of the entire community.  When you look at the bug
report the status is being set back and forth and that one person
apparently just "cancelling" this bug while it is reported by a number of
others.

This very point is the main concern on this whole thing.  If Ubuntu is a
community, which it should be, then this should not ever happen.  One
person's opinion should not over rule everyone else's opinion.  I am not
sure who she is, but this whole process was not something that you could
call an executive decision.  Perhaps she had no capacity, knowledge, or
interest to fix this bug and thus wanted to put it under the carpet for
whatever reason.  And the reason does not even matter here!  It is a
community and this would be a point when others could step in an offer
their expertise and time and do fix the bug.  However with her actions she
did not only stepped down, but also stopped others to work on it since she
simple "cancelled" this bug out entirely.  And this is not some little
design point or some minor program we are talking about but either grub or
the dist upgrade process that has a functionality which should not be that
way to be able called "workable".

Per what I see something is working if it requires no attention in the
future and it just does what it should.  This is per definition "working".
 Anything else is a bug.

Now, if I install an Ubuntu system, say on a customers computer, and make
that system a workable system (which sometimes might require some custom
tuning due to no out of box support for some sort of hardware) then I would
think that this is a workable system and the user, with no knowledge of
command prompt, not knowing what grub was and if thinking that dpkg was
some special ice cream should not be able to break a fully workable system
just by clicking on a button of dist upgrade and entering her own password.
And again, in some of the mentioned cases there was not even any manual
config and handling of the system but was a clear automated install broken
by a simple upgrade.

I personally think that we as a community need to look at this issue and I
am not talking about the bug itself (which needs to be fixed too) but the
issue of one person's opinion could cancel out (and thus enrage) other
people of the community with living an issue hanging in the air with no
apparent way of solving the different opinions in any way shape or form.
 It should not be that who has a higher authority that is right no matter
how wrong she is.

Is there anyone at canonical that can take a look at this?  Seems a
correction of this particular programmer needed on dealing with community
raised bugs specially because she won't be able to work like this with the
rest of the guys if she does not let them propose solutions and fixes but
trying to silence them.

With Kind Regards,

Gabor Toth

Phone: +45-2163-4983
Skype: gabor.me

Copenhagen, Denmark


On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 5:42 AM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com>wrote:

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