From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andrew Morton Subject: Re: Reporting bugs and bisection (was: Re: 2.6.25-rc8: FTP transfer errors) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:18:31 -0700 Message-ID: <20080413121831.d89dd424.akpm@linux-foundation.org> References: <47FEADCB.7070104@rtr.ca> <22880.1207943922@turing-police.cc.vt.edu> <47FFE5DA.8000709@imap.cc> <200804132040.12138.rjw@sisk.pl> <20080413184730.GD8474@1wt.eu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" , Tilman Schmidt , Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu, Mark Lord , David Miller , jesper.juhl@gmail.com, yoshfuji@linux-ipv6.org, jeff@garzik.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org To: Willy Tarreau Return-path: Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:38799 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752130AbYDMTTP (ORCPT ); Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:19:15 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20080413184730.GD8474@1wt.eu> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:47:30 +0200 Willy Tarreau wrote: > 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.