Re: Why is troubleshooting Linux so hard?
Well I'm pleased for the discussion and particularly grateful to
Klistvud who says many of my ideas far more eloquently than I can.
I want to digress briefly and remind everyone that for as controversial
as you may think software standards are, accounting standards are far
worse. The SEC, AICPA, IASB, CICA (in Canada) and many other acronyms
have to balance on a razor-thin line between protecting the public from
deception and making business too expensive and bureaucratic to run.
Standards bodies know that a new regulation which strengthens ethics
could cost the market billions in restated earnings and new compliance
systems but they make it work! So, no, I'm not recommending that we
emulate them but certainly we can learn from their effort.
Therefore, let's return to the concept of public interest. I am neither
a programmer nor a packager so I consider myself part of the open source
public. My expectations of software, which I hope aren't controversial,
are that software should do what it's advertised to do, keep my data
intact, and not interfere with other parts of the computer from doing
their jobs. Obviously, if software did this, there wouldn't be any need
for bug reports.
So, yes, software breaks. But that's okay because I'm patient and
understanding and I can usually recover from the crashes or work around
them... just as long as I believe that some day it'll be fixed and not
break anymore. So, the idea, and the point of the subject of this
thread, is what do the public like me do when software breaks?
My thesis is that FLOSS software currently breaks in a way that doesn't
give me enough of the right symptoms to fix the problem myself or ask
for help intelligently. If anyone still doesn't believe me, I'll
subscribe you to my computer logs and a commentary of my problems!
So, what I want are better symptoms from software. Ideally, I want an
error message which I can plug into Google and be directed to a probable
cause of the problem. I can usually handle things from there.
Currently, I can't tell what error messages and log entries are related
to a problem I'm having. Worse, if I plug the error message into
Google, I get directed to old source repositories, bug reports totally
unrelated to my problem, flame wars and a tedious variety of dead ends
and wild goose chases. Surely there must be a better way to
troubleshoot FLOSS!
Finally, I don't care how software reaches this utopian state. It can
be top-down, bottom-up, sideways, revolutionary, explosive or any which
organisation or movement or argument or death threat which lets me
participate in the community without having to specialise in computer
science.
Borden
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