[packman] [opensuse-factory] make it just work

[Brian K. White]

On 4/11/2011 12:28 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 05:40:24PM +0200, jdd wrote:
>> Le 11/04/2011 16:56, Greg KH a écrit :
>>
>>
>>> Not true at all, this is up to the Packman developers, nothing the
>>> openSUSE developers can do about this for lots of various legal reasons,
>>> as has been stated numerous times here.
>>
>> well, if the legal problem impacts not only the distribution but
>> also the bugreports, this is a bad news.
>
> No, the issue is that packman bugs belong to packman, not to the main
> openSUSE bugzilla, as the openSUSE developers can do nothing about
> packman packages.
>
> It's just that simple, sorry.
>
> greg k-h

You can't say that.

There are countless examples of software that has to operate with other 
software, and the cause of a bug that the user sees may completely be in 
the "supported" software even though it only appears when used in 
concert with some "unsupported" software. At the very least such things 
should at least be investigated to determine where the bug really is.

Supported app crashes on start when unsupported library is used.

The easy answer is "Doesn't crash with the supported library, therefor 
not our problem."

Wrong for at least two reasons:

* The user doesn't care about this distinction, they just won't use the 
system any more if there is any other system that supports it's _users_ 
better. A system that is so closed to the rest of the world is _not 
useful_. A system that users do not want to use is not useful to the 
vendor or anyone else involved in creating the system.

* The bug could absolutely be in the _supported_ app rather than in the 
unsupported library. Regardless, it must _at least_ be investigated 
enough to find out which part of the two-part system is in error.

Do you ignore all samba bug reports that involve Windows clients? After 
all the same bug doesn't appear in kde on a suse desktop?

Do you ignore all Apache bug reports that come from IE or Safari users? 
After all the same bug doesn't appear in mozilla on a suse desktop?

Real example, less than perfectly clearly described,
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.unix.sco.misc/2006-11/msg00115.html

The point was you have 3 pieces of software, the OS itself, ksh, and 
filePro. Individually they each can be said to have been "proven" 
working correctly. I "proved" it myself with special tests that exercise 
the particular thing I was trying to do. Yet together, doing something 
that they are definitely supposed to be able to do, nothing unsupported, 
they absolutely always fail in exactly the same way. _someone_ has to 
step up and figure out what the problem is or else it will never get 
fixed. And it never was, and I simply no longer use 2 of those 3 
components any more. I have to use filePro, but I don't have to use SCO 
Unix or ksh. All 3 components in the original scenario were closed 
source commercial software so I as a user was helpless to the vendors to 
fix it. Without access to the source, or even debug-enabled binaries, 
all I could do was construct and perform the tests I did to 
reproduce/exhibit the problem and isolate it from any other factors.
But the vendors of all 3 parts had more than enough "proof" to make 
exactly the argument you just made.

Well that was certainly easy for them but it didn't solve the problem 
and now the user has gone elsewhere, which doesn't sound like much of a 
solution. Once all the users go elsewhere you can just stay home on your 
couch and not even write any software at all, that's even easier.

-- 
bkw