Re: major linux problems summary 2012
On Sun, 4 Nov 2012, Salvo Tomaselli <tiposchi@tiscali.it> wrote:
> > Linux/open source developers are usually not interested in fixing bugs if
> > they cannot easily reproduce them. This problem plagues virtually all
> > Open Source projects.
>
> Well in proprietary software you are usually required to blindly purchase
> an upgrade and hope that the bugs afflicting you have been fixed.
It's actually worse than that. Sometimes a major upgrade to commercial
software is impossible due to dependencies on other software and the vendor
refuses to provide a minor fix. One example that I encountered was a memory
leak in syslogd on Solaris 2.6. It probably would have been easy for me to fix
if I had the source, but it was proprietary. It couldn't be upgraded because
major upgrades to a working system are always painful and because we weren't
sure that the proprietary applications would work well. So I put in a cron
job to restart the buggy daemon. After upgrading the network in question to
Linux there were no problems like that.
On Sun, 4 Nov 2012, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> These sorts of articles seem to always be written as if the author
> honestly expects the list to be some sort of profound revelation. That no
> one even realizes these problems exist, and that now that they've been
> identified and put into a list, this will somehow be helpful in solving
> them.
For every difficult problem there is a simple solution which is wrong.
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