Re: Filing bug reports in Debian (was Re: Debian Stole My Name!)

[Hal Vaughan <hal@thresholddigital.com>]

On Tuesday 14 October 2008, Eduardo M KALINOWSKI wrote:
> Hal Vaughan escreveu:
> > I don't mean this with any offense, but you're so wrapped up in the
> > details you're not seeing what's going on.  You're re-arranging the
> > deck chairs on the Titanic.
>
> I may be, after all this thread has been going on very long. So I
> kindly ask you to summarize what did you do before the upgrade that
> caused the automatic update of the file to make it invalid and the
> system unbootable.

It was two years ago.  I don't remember all the details, but basically I 
did something like "aptitude update && aptitude upgrade", got a new 
kernel image, and a clobbered menu.lst and it took me hours before I 
got the server up and running.  The system worked fine until I 
upgraded, then it wouldn't boot.  I had no idea why and finally tracked 
it to a re-written menu.lst.

But, again, this misses the point: I don't file bug reports because, in 
my experience, they either don't go anywhere, they are closed out as 
quickly as possible with whatever excuse can be drummed up to justify 
it, or, in some cases, the dev can even get insulting.

I did not bring up this bug as an example, someone else did.  However, 
since it was brought up, my point was that I had a strong point: 
Someone can use apt or aptitude and has every reason to expect prompts 
before files are overwritten and in this case, there's no prompt or 
warning.  That leads to menu.lst being clobbered without notice.

Now, as for a detail, if I had been warned, I would have been able to 
make a backup of my menu.lst, then checked over before rebooting. 

However it's not about me.  It's about a confusing and unproductive 
behavior.  I filed a bug report doing what I thought I was supposed to 
do and almost all of the content of the replies is about what is in 
menu.lst and other points and almost nothing addressed the issue of the 
file being clobbered.

My point from the start was that, in my experience, bug reports are not 
productive or worth my effort.  This one is not a top example, but it 
demonstrates the point and the fact that, when it came up, most of the 
discussion has not been about the file being overwritten but about the 
contents of the file.

That's why I feel many people don't get it and are missing the key 
point.


Hal