Re: Interesting comments

[John Summerfield <debian herakles homelinux org>]

Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 08:59 +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
>
> > If you can describe how to reproduce a problem, you
> > 1. Validate the original complaint
> > 2. Demonstrate that there is enough information for the developer to 
> > proceed.
> > 3. Provide a testcase that can be used to demonstrate that the problem 
> > has been fixed.
> > 4. Advance your own skills, perhaps on the road to becoming "maintainer" 
> > of something.
> >
> > If you can't reproduce a problem, it's going to be very hard indeed to 
> > fix it. For that reason many kernel bugs can be difficult.
>
> Just because you (the triager) can't reproduce it doesn't mean no-one
> else can.

That is true.

> Maybe the bug's in KDE and you run GNOME, or the bug's in Fedora 9 and

Anyone triaging GNOME should be running it, at lease some of the time. I 
normally use KDE, what do I care about GNOME (unless I'm paid to)?


> you run 10, or the bug only happens on NVIDIA graphics cards and you
> have an ATI. There's lots of bugs that not necessarily anyone in the
> triage team will be able to reproduce.

Al that is true, but then maybe the triager should be leaving it alone, 
or just taking some steps.
> Reproducing a bug is, indeed, a great way - almost infallible - to be
> sure the report has sufficient information and can therefore be triaged.
> But I don't think it's the *only* way, and it shouldn't be required...

Read the problems I had with kernel 2.6.25. They're on this list, and in 
Bugzilla.

Sure a triager can't be expected to reproduce every bug, but whenever 
possible they should try. Even if it means reinstalling an older release 
( and yes, I know not everyone can do that, but I expect some RH 
employees _can_). Considering the problems I (and importantly, others) 
had with the HP DC7700 I think I would expect RH to acquire some (it's a 
corporate desktop system and I know RHEL customers use them).


As an aside, I now manage a brace of DC5850s. They're different (AMD 
chipset and processor, not Intel) and newer, but I was very pleased to 
find the diagnostic disk boots Linux. I figure the prospects of running 
Linux on them is excellent, and in fact I use Linux to deploy Windows.




--

Cheers
John

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