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

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Sunday, 13 of April 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:47:30 +0200 Willy Tarreau <w@xxxxxx> 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.

IMHO we should try to make that difficult.
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