Re: Linux is moving too fast

From: Fielder George Dowding <fgdowding@iceworm-enterprises.org>
Date: Mon Oct 22 2007 - 13:54:22 AKDT

Kevin Miller wrote:
> Arthur Corliss wrote:
>> Greetings:
>>
>> In reference to the previous thread we had on the increasing bugginess of
>> Linux there's this article:
>>
>> http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202404635
>>
>> It's an unfortunate state of affairs, and core maintainers recognize it. I
>> think Linus is dead wrong, and hopefully his lieutenants will sway him back
>> to the good side of the force.
>
> And the other side of the coin: http://lwn.net/Articles/255315/
>

Thanks to both Arthur and Kevin. I read both articles (Charles Babcock's
 "How Linux Is Testing The Limits Of Open Source Development" in
_Information_Week (IW)_, and the response by corbet in Linux Weekly News
(lwn)). Quite frankly, after reading the IW piece I was ready for the
lwn response.

Now then, what, if anything, shall we AKLUG'ers do?

Can those of us in AKLUG who are interested in such things, band
together to help with debugging the kernel? This seems to be a need that
Babcock brought up and even quoted corbet in lwn (it must have been a
previous article that I didn't read):

<blockquote>At the summit, Morton said he wanted to appoint "a nasty
person" to be kernel bugmaster, someone to identify bug sources and
"beat up on developers who do not fix bugs," according to kernel
developer Jonathan Corbet's account, published by the Linux Foundation.
Natalie Protasevich was named bugmaster, and Morton says she has brought
more discipline to bug clean-up, even if she falls short of his
description of preferred temperament. There were more than 1,500 bugs in
the kernel's Bugzilla database; it's down to 1,400.
</blockquote>

I have a difficult time telling the difference between a software bug,
bad hardware, and my own fat finger and slow speed brain when things
don't seem to be working the way I either expect or want.

Perhaps helping Natalie in not something of wide enough interest for
AKLUG'ers to support. I bet there is something, like the Friday Night
Laboratory Session, that a sub-group could take on to help free software
in dominating the world.

-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Best regards       Debian/GNU Linux
Fielder George Dowding, Chief Iceworm        "etch" Testing
dba Iceworm Enterprises, Anchorage, Alaska   User Number 269482
Since 1976 - Over 30 Years of Service.       "Seth" 186667
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Received on Mon Oct 22 13:51:51 2007

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