On Mon, 2016-07-18 at 11:20 +0200, Martijn Grendelman wrote: > Hi, > > Last week, I submitted a bug report for the Jessie kernel, and so it > happened I arrived at the 'Bugs in source package linux' page [1]. > > What immediately caught my eye was the enormous amount of unclassified bugs: > > Outstanding bugs -- Important bugs; Unclassified (463 bugs) > Outstanding bugs -- Normal bugs; Unclassified (623 bugs) > > Many of these are about kernel versions that predate Wheezy (which is > OLDSTABLE, if you neeed reminding) by YEARS. Heck, the oldest bug in the > 'important' section was reported 21 Dec 2007! It has been reassigned to > 'linux' in 2013 and has not seen any updates since. > > So, my somewhat worried question is -and please do not see this as a > disqualification of all the good work that is actually being done in > > Debian- does anyone ever even look at these bugs? I don't think anyone is systematically reviewing the bug list, though some have tried in the past. I usually look at new bug reports coming in to see if there's anything I can do. and I periodically look at recent bug reports when preparing a new upload. > What is the problem here? To be brutal about it: the kernel is a large complicated system full of bugs, as are the hardware and firmware that support it. Just understanding an issue can be very hard. The easy bugs generally get fixed quickly while the hard ones linger. The kernel team semss pretty large (particularly if you look at the list on Alioth) but the total amount of time spent on it is not that much and it is extremely rare that we can do anything about the hard bugs other than forward upstream. For any bugs in unstable, other than in the packaging or our chosen build config, it is usually sensible to go upstream instead or as well as reporting in Debian. Ben. > > [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=linux -- Ben Hutchings Editing code like this is akin to sticking plasters on the bleeding stump of a severed limb. - me, 29 June 1999
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