Re: reboot/halt/shutdown does nothing
On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 22:08:34 +1300
Chris Bannister <cbannister@slingshot.co.nz> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:01:25AM +0000, Joe wrote:
> >
> > Eventually a few more clues confirmed that it was an audio problem,
> > and suggested pulseaudio, which I had installed a couple of months
> > earlier for a particular experiment. I ripped it out, and sound no
> > longer worked of course, but my computer would shut down again, and
> > Iceweasel worked. Running the alsa configuration restored sound.
>
> Did you report a bug¹? I say this because there is currently a bit of
> a discussion about pulseaudio on the devel list, and of course, if the
> maintainer doesn't know about the issues then he/she can't do anything
> about it.
>
> ¹ Forgive me if you are already aware that as a sid user, part of your
> responsibility is to report bugs.
>
Yes, but it is also important not to waste peoples' time, and there
will be no way to reproduce this. Even today there is no sign on the Net
that anyone else is seeing it, which experience tells me means that
I'm probably the only one who had the problem. As it was not exactly an
obscure bug, I'm quite certain that someone else should have at least
asked for help about it. There was a possibility that the OP was also
seeing it, which would have altered things.
I don't even know for sure that the problem is in pulseaudio, just that
there were a few hints about it, and removal also removed the problem.
But the root cause might be in some other package entirely, possibly
one not connected with audio. I've seen GTK produce some odd results in
various packages, and indeed it is still causing odd scrollbar
behaviour under some (completely reproducible) conditions. This is known
about, even the exact reason is known, and it *may* be fixed one day.
I've had quite a few problems like this one, where I appear to be the
only one with a problem, and I've no doubt that most other sid users
have the same experience. I did once have a major meltdown after a perl
upgrade (exactly, nothing worked, not even dpkg) and needed to
reinstall, but nobody else saw anything untoward. Early on, I did
report everything, but I quickly realised that if I couldn't reliably
reproduce a bug and provide traces, and other evidence, there was no
point in reporting it. It just wasted time that could have been spent
fixing better-documented bugs. Seeing something non-reproducible, what
Windows users call 'Just One Of Those Things', just isn't worth
reporting. Operating systems and their applications are now well beyond
being deterministic on a human scale.
I've reported several problems with claws-mail, one of which still
exists after several years. It was only when I recently ran it under a
different DE (oddly it was because of this pulseaudio problem, XFCE
seemed less affected than LXDE, which wouldn't display its panel), and
the problem didn't exist there, that I realised why it hasn't been
fixed...
--
Joe
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