Bud Frede <
frede@mouse-potato.com> writes:
Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> writes:
So in terms of the Zawinski’s complaint post the situation has
deteriorated. Although I think the underlying issue is that he doesn’t
(or didn’t) believe in stable releases while Debian and its users do.
I think the real issue is that problems with packaged software in a
distro are often reported to the developer and not the packager or the
distro itself as they should be. Jamie was annoyed that Debian users
would report bugs to him that were only still extant in the very
out-dated version of xscreensaver that Debian was shipping.
That seems like a problem with the users choosing to bypass the distribution’s own bug reporting mechanisms.
19 months being “very out-dated” is JWZ’s viewpoint. It wasn’t the distribution’s view and wasn’t (and still isn’t) the view of a large chunk of end users, who (collectively) often complain about having to
upgrade.
Some software does legitimately have a very short upgrade cycle, even disregarding security issues. For example, the timezone database, where
civil authorities have a tendency to make rather short-notice
changes. I’m not convinced that a screensaver should really fall into
this category. But that’s another question.
I'm sure that there are other developers that experience the same thing,
but are perhaps not as vocal about it as JWZ.
Yes, it happens all the time. If you publish software (for free or
otherwise) people will keep running it longer than you’d like, and they
will send low-quality support requests and bug reports to whatever bug-reporting or support channel you advertize. Just part of life as a
software developer; you need to find a strategy for managing it which
works for you.
In the case at hand, JWZ was trying to manage it with grumpy code
comments and blog posts; it doesn’t sound like it was very effective.
Long ago I was in a conversation with someone about whether a particular distribution’s bug tracking system should be made easier to use. It
wasn’t particularly user-friendly by the standards of the time, so it
seemed like a reasonable suggestion. But his view was that the
distribution had plenty of bug reports already, in fact far more than it
could address with the resources it had. Spending effort making it
easier to report bugs would help precisely nobody - the same effort
should be spent on something else (for example, fixing some bugs).
Personally, I just assume that when I'm using a distro, I will report
any issues to the distro's maintainers. The only times I would reach
out to a developer whose software I use is if I want to make a
donation in appreciation of their hard work, or perhaps if I had a
suggestion for a new feature or something.
Yes, normally the distribution should be the first port of call. And
Debian’s tooling (e.g. the reportbug command) does try to make that
easy. But the distribution can’t force its users to behave in any
particular way.
--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/
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