Re: Why is troubleshooting Linux so hard?
Hi, Borden:
On Tuesday 16 November 2010 22:43:38 Borden Rhodes wrote:
[...]
> Why are there so many duplicate and incomplete bug reports and fora
> which ask the same questions over and over? I've been guilty of
> submitting duplicate bug reports even after I spent an hour searching
> Google to make sure it hadn't been reported or solved already. I'm not
> asking to be able to understand the error messages. I'm asking for them
> to be useful in a search or forum post so we can solve the problem and
> help the other Linux users.
>
> But how would such a utopian scheme be implemented? Well, my training
> is in accounting so I'll tell you how they solve these problems. A
> governing body, like the SEC or AICPA, recognises a problem in its
> standards and rules which, for example, allowed Enron to get away with
> what it did for as long as it did. They sit down and they say 'this
> shouldn't happen again if accountants do this.' They pass a regulation
> and they say 'anyone who wants to issue compliant financial statements
> needs to play by these rules.'
And that's exactly why this wouldn't work for software: where's the governing
body for programs? where's the authority to prosecute those not abiding to
regulations?
It's not only that those don't exist but that it would be extremely negative
if they existed.
The best you can do is promoting sane standards and hope for others to follow
you.
> They don't chase down every practising
> accountant and every registered company and convince them to use the new
> standards. They just tell them that, to be part of the club, they have
> to play by the new rules. Debian, to my understanding, works that way.
Yes, it could do that.
> A package which doesn't follow the rules has a grave bug filed against
> it and isn't included in the new release until it's fixed. Why does it
> have to be any more complicated for making error messages useful?
It's an interpersonal matter as much as a technical one. While Debian
Developers call themselves "developers" they are not *code* developers (not
needed, at least). Probably it could be more descriptive if they were
called "Debian Packagers", but that's the way it is. As such, most of them
are not so into the software quality itself but about the packaging effort.
That's, again, neither good nor bad, but simply the way it is and, hey, it is
not as if packaging were not already quite a significative effort.
> I have a working knowledge of C, Java
> and a few other languages. I can't even read the source code to the
> simplest projects let alone figure out why it crashed on me!
That's probably the same quite a lot of DD could say about themselves (see my
previous point).
Of course I'd surely want Debian Developers giving efforts not only on
packaging (and, heck, they usually do a damn good work of it) but that they
were wisely/magically choosing what software to package under the highest
levels of quality, engineering and maintainability and, on top to that,
either developing themselves for the "holes" they'd found for such a highest
standards or successfully tutorizing other upstream maintainers in such
convincing manners that they'd either thankfully accepted their patches
and/or made their own developments of better quality.
But am I really in the position of realistically asking for that? Would it be
even honest on my side, specially given that I'm not even doing what they
already do, that is, packaging a very useful software for me? I don't think
so. It's just wishful thinking as my desire to win a multimillion lotto:
nice to dream of, but nothing to base planning upon.
Cheers.
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