On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 10:59:17PM -0400, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 07:49:15PM -0500, Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> was heard to say:
> > It's not grave. Video cards falling over dead when they receive DDC
> > probes is the hardware manufacturer's fault.
>
> True, but OTOH, running on broken hardware (especially broken *and common*
> hardware) is, sadly, the job of software. Particularly the installer.
Yes, but let's remember the definition of "grave":
grave
makes the package in question unuseable or mostly so, or causes
data loss, or introduces a security hole allowing access to the
accounts of users who use the package.
Now, some people hoot and holler about hardware-specific things being
"grave", but they're lunatics. Under that logic we'd yank XFree86 from
Debian for failing to support every single video card ever made, and
we'd yank the kernel because it didn't have a driver for some weird USB
2.0 device.
Severity inflation and arguments from personal annoyance are *not* a
good way to persuade a package maintainer to adopt your point of view.
(This, of course, presumes that persuasion instead of soapboxing is the
point of the report.)
No, at worst, such hardware-specific bugs are "important".
--
G. Branden Robinson | We either learn from history or,
Debian GNU/Linux | uh, well, something bad will
branden@debian.org | happen.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Bob Church
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