Re: On maintainers not responding to bugs
On Wednesday 28 February 2007 01:19, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> In all fairness, you didn't seem to comment on his response to your
> suggestion.
I did comment on his suggestion.
"Yes, it should start before NFS because its not just mounting a file system
like NFS. It needs to make the block devices available."
Not to mention there was a thread on debian-devel at the time where I thought
he was MIA because he was so unresponsive.
> (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=387552;msg=30;att=0).
> This seems to be more of a case of not liking his solution than having a
> legitimate grievance?
The solution flat out does not work. I mean, as his scripts are written, the
machine hangs on shutdown. Here's the basic happenings of that bug.
Sept. 14 - I send initial bug report.
Oct. 2 - After 3.5 weeks the maintainer releases a new package, claiming it
fixed the bug. I then attempt to point out that the script is not working.
Oct. 3 - I attach my implementation of the init script that at least lets the
filesystems mount.
Oct. 9 - I try to get the maintainer to do something about letting it
propagate to testing as I think the "fix" is not a fix. I do not escalate the
bug myself because I am not the maintainer.
Oct. 12 - The maintainer replies only because a thread on debian-devel[1]
calls into question his ability to maintain the package. I then respond with
a comment on the only thing relevant in the email (the order of start scripts
and how AOE is different from NFS). I provide a link to Coraid's (the
implementer of aoe in the kernel) documentation about setting up this
hardware.
Nov. 8 - I document why the new revision of the package doesn't work even for
the mounting case, and I document that udev may be the right way to
completely avoid the race condition.
I'd like to point out that the above occurred over about a two month period.
One response from the maintainer that was prompted by pinging debian-devel is
ridiculous.
As you can see there is only one human response in there, and I did respond to
the critical question of his email. He seems to only respond when things get
emotionally charged or when I publically tried to see if some other developer
could comment on my changes.
The maintainer's behavior made him very discouraging to work with. I just
stopped dealing with him after a while. It hasn't stopped me from filing
other bug reports.
You may think I'm a whiner, but the fact of the matter is that my hardware
flat out does not work with his scripts, and he was unresponsive to my
suggestions for fixing them. He didn't even want to consider the use case
that someone might want to treat a block device like a block device instead
of a filesystem container. If you don't want to consider it non-responsive,
it was at least really unproductive and frustrating.
[1]http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/10/msg00451.html
wt
--
Warren Turkal, Research Associate III/Systems Administrator
Colorado State University, Dept. of Atmospheric Science
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