Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:59:42 -0400 | Subject | RFC: Updating the LKML bug reporting/updating framework | From | Robert Bradbury <> |
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I do not know much in these areas having learned my craft by digging UNIX source code listings out of wastebaskets at Harvard (freshman weren't really supposed to have access to the UNIX source code in 1974). And I hardly ever used the Oracle bug reporting system in the mid-1980s. But I have used the Mozilla, Gnome and Gentoo public bug reporting and tracking systems to a fair extent in recent years and they seem to work fairly effectively.
They have good search engines. They attach patches to bug reports which fix the stated problems. They allow for discussion, assessment, voting and presumably for the powers in charge the keeping of statistics regarding the state of the software.
Now, the LKML seems to to be a throwback almost to 1971 when the first email messages were sent between a couple of PDP-10s. It has patches that I have no interest in, discussions I have no interest in and were it not for Gmail's search function it would be generally useless (very high Noise-to-Signal ratio). Now maybe I do not understand the Linux development process. Maybe this is a "Wizard of Oz" case and there is a hidden bug reporting system hidden behind the curtain -- but in spite of my best efforts I cannot locate it.
Why in this day and age (ignoring historical inertia) has Linux failed to adopt a robust (modern) bug reporting system? Can this be fixed? Or is Linux really a case of a "proprietary software" system pretending to be open [1]?
Robert Bradbury
1. If a software system is so complex that its quirks and pitfalls cannot easily be located and avoided (witness the ondemand scheduler problem on Pentium IV's message I recently filed) then is it not *effectively* open source. I am qualified to read hardware manuals, I am qualified to rewrite C code (having written code generators for several C compilers) but the LKML is like the windmill and I feel like Don Quixote tilting back and forth in front of it. One could even argue that the lack of an open bug reporting system (and "current state" online reports) effectively makes Linux a non-open-source system. Should not Linux be the one of the first systems to make all knowledge completely available? Or is it doomed to be replaced by systems which might provide such capabilities (Android perhaps???)
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