Re: How to reduce the number of open kernel bugs

Daniel Hazelton
2008-05-02T16:30:00Z

On Friday 02 May 2008 10:42:21 Parag Warudkar wrote:
> Adrian Bunk <bunk <at> kernel.org> writes:
> > Maintainer:
> >
> > Yeah, in any case. I cannot fix it, since it's not a bug in the fobar
> > code. Please reopen a new bug and CC the architecture or PCI maintainer
> > or whatever person related to the bus, chipset or CPU, if you think the
> > foobar device still works. If the foobar hardware got corrupted, you
> > already know what to do...
> >
> > I am well aware that loud flames are often the only working way of
> > communication in Linux kernel development, but we mustn't communicate
> > this way with bug submitters.
>
> Actually this way of _communication_ is better because the maintainer has -
>
> a) at least seen the bug
> b) made it clear upfront that he/she is not in a position to fix it and
> c) not inflicted a huge amount of follow up work for the reporter
> while giving no hope that it will be fixed.
>
> There is not much you can do if the maintainer feels he/she can't do
> anything - apart from fixing it yourself which has its limits.
> So the best that can be done is to communicate it clearly - that
> happens in this case.

With the above behavior, someone is reporting "I can use OS's A, B and C with
no problems - the hardware works perfectly. When I try to use Linux X.Y.Z the
driver faults and makes things unusable." and the maintainer is saying "The
driver is fine. I didn't write code that has any bugs in it. The problem is
your hardware is broken."

That kind of response is irresponsible and idiotic. If the hardware works
perfectly in every other OS - and possibly even previous versions of Linux -
then obviously the hardware isn't broken. This is what Adrian was pointing
out and is exactly what shouldn't be happening.

DRH

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