Thread (78 messages) 78 messages, 27 authors, 2008-04-17

Re: Reporting bugs and bisection (was: Re: 2.6.25-rc8: FTP transfer errors)

From: Rafael J. Wysocki <hidden>
Date: 2008-04-13 19:27:36
Also in: lkml

On Sunday, 13 of April 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:47:30 +0200 Willy Tarreau [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
 One other thing which might get confusing/frustrating on the
user side is that currently, Linux is the *only* product which requires
the bug reporter to find the fault change
That's because many (probably most) Linux bugs are dependent upon the
hardware which they run on, and developers cannot reproduce the failure on
their hardware.  Other software products don't have that problem.


That being said..  four or five years ago, developers would often work
closely with the reporter working out why the reporter's failure was
occurring.  Several days of back-and-forth.

We dont' do that as much nowadays - there's a tendency to

a) throw the problem back at the reporter, often asking them to bisect. 
   If the reporter is running a distro kernel (eg: Fedora) then that's
   quite hard, and often isn't a think they have knowledge to do.  So
   they'll just disappear.  Or

b) just ignore the report altogether.
IMHO we should try to make that difficult.
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