Response from Canonical?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| montezuma Apr 11, 2010 9:00 PM EDT |
Caitlyn, I have been hearing about this issue for several years. I am a Ubuntu user who deploys it on many different platforms. When I upgrade there are always some niggling problems. Some worse than others but after a week or two most are sorted out. I have complained for years that Canonical should pay more attention to QA and they did pay it lip service about 2 years ago. But it seems nothing much has really changed. So it would be good to get a point by point response from Canonical to the issues you raise. As a journalist you really owe it to your audience if you raise these issues to attempt to get a rebuttal directly from the source. Comments are one thing but a response from Zimmerman or equivalent would be much better. Some rational dialogue on this valid concern would be productive. Just my 2c. |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 12, 2010 2:41 AM EDT |
I recommend all my family and friends who use Ubuntu to wait a month before upgrading to a new Ubuntu release. In that time, most bugs have been shaken out. |
| caitlyn Apr 12, 2010 3:33 AM EDT |
@Sander: If they decide to fix the bug at all within the release cycle. They decided not to in the case of the horribly broken Intel graphics drivers in Jaunty. It appears they are doing the same with the udev or devicekit issue which impacted my printer and several other HP and Minolta models at the very least. One of my big complaints in the article is the conscious decision by Ubuntu to not fix bugs, including serious ones, with a release cycle and to simply wait until the next release. @Montezuma: Your suggestion is valid but too many people have tried and it always comes to nothing but canned responses and no change. Do you remember Chris Smart's articles about Karmic: http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7600/1.html http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7600/1.html Read what Bryce Harrington of Canonical wrote about Karmic last November: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2009-Novemb... They know about the problems over there. They really do. Chris Smart even got to talk to Mark Shuttleworth about it after his articles were published. The sad fact is that absolutely nothing changed. |
| jacog Apr 12, 2010 4:08 AM EDT |
Just one thing- "circling the wagons" is a defensive move, not offensive. :P Ok, I'll get back to my work now. |
| chalex Apr 12, 2010 1:15 PM EDT |
Caitlyn, if you think that Canonical is not responsive to your requests, have you considered paying them money? |
| tuxchick Apr 12, 2010 1:41 PM EDT |
LOL, bribe Canonical to fix defects? chalex, you are a comedian. Though I shouldn't be so quick to laugh, anything is possible, that could be in their business plan. I am not impressed with Canonical's QA either. Oh I know all the excuses, "it works for me!", "stick with LTS if you want it to actually work", etc. The thing is, trying to persuade *buntu users and testers that no, it's really not that buggy and everything is all happy isn't going to work. Fixing bugs does that. Caitlyn, Mr. Shuttleworth is a master at deflecting criticism, rather than addressing it. He's the last person to take any problems to. You probably noticed the rhetorical tricks used in the famous window button thread to tell people to bug off, instead of replying to their concerns. [url=https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/light-themes/ bug/532633]https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/light-themes/ bug/...[/url] |
| hkwint Apr 12, 2010 2:12 PM EDT |
Caitlyn, help me, I'm a bit lost. There are people who do technical things: Those deprecating HAL and merging its features in Xorg server 1.8, those making drivers for Minolta and HP devices, those writing graphics drivers. Those people work on SANE, CUPS, Linux Kernel, Xorg, HPIJS and so on. Then, there are those who do 'selection', bundling and configuration. Like the ones who make Ubuntu. But they're also supposed to do Q&A. Nonetheless, if there are issues with HAL, XSANE, CUPS, the kernel or HPIJS, those are technical issues. Then I don't understand how "fixing Ubuntu isn't a technical issue". It normally is a strategic issue how much effort some company puts in Q&A, but after all Q&A eventually _is_ all about technological issues! I worked in a Q&A department where the strategic decision was made not to put to much effort in it (hence I'm unemployed now). We Q&A'ed or _own_ products we knew about which saves lots of efforts. Even if someone at Ubuntu decides to put priority in Q&A however, they have to assure the quality of products they didn't design. Eventually it all boils down to technical issues again, even if policy changes. |
| tmx Apr 12, 2010 2:14 PM EDT |
I agree with Sander, don't even install the final version of 10.04 to your working pc until a while. I was one of the optimist for this version, but I'm having some doubts to what they are trying to achieve. It seem as the versions progresses there are more bugs and less legacy support. Every new version seems to break something. I am trying the beta 2 right now. Okay its still beta and unless I'm mistaken, I read that the 'freeze' is supposed to be April 15th, 3 days from now. If they only have 72 more hours to fix this they'll need some caffeine. Can't even install Samba gtk interface because of unsolved dependencies in the repository. Nautilus have no test address bar by default. The skin isn't even designed correctly. The panel is too short so if you resize it, you'll get tiling. They switch the position of the close button to the outside, that way the user could mirror it to the right side of the title bar without breaking the visual appearance of skin. So they had to compromise their own design and it doesn't even have anything to do with usability. I simply use GiMP and fix it for them: http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b233/eksasol/ubuntubuttons... Obviously the reason why they didn't caught this bug in the first place is because the people they hired to design the skin used Photoshop on Mac computers. The whole idea of the user having to play catch up every 6months and trying to keep existing or older softwares working is strenuous at best. That reminds me of Windows where you have to reinstall it whenever something goes wrong. I can't imagine this to be an LTS. |
| caitlyn Apr 12, 2010 2:39 PM EDT |
@Hans: Let me clarify what I said. Of course failing to fix bugs or packaging code that isn't ready for prime time are technical issues. What I probably should have said was that the decisions to do these things, like the decision to cut QA at your former employer, are management and strategic decisions which are based on non-technical, bottom line business considerations. Is that clearer? |
| caitlyn Apr 12, 2010 2:40 PM EDT |
@tucxhick: Actually, if you follow the links in some of my responses to comments we have seen responses from Jono Bacon, from Bryce Harrington and from others at Canonical. Some of those responses sound great but in the end nothing changes. That's why I feel like doing as Montezuma suggests would be like talking to a brick wall. |
| tuxchick Apr 12, 2010 3:06 PM EDT |
Caitlyn, I'm not sure I would see any point in trying to get a point-by-point response from Canonical anyway. None of this is any big secret-- Launchpad is full of bug reports, and this business of not fixing bugs until the next release, if ever, goes back years. Remember our fun thread on O'Reilly blogs that was inspired by all the hand-wringing over fixing Aumix, which didn't work because it had not been compiled correctly? And all the masses of "reasons" why it could not be fixed?
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/12/ubuntu_innovate... I cherish this quote in the Aumix bug report to this day: Quoting: Since the Gutsy release is already out, aumix for Gutsy has entered a stable "buggy state". Any new package would cause the buggy state to be changed, thus require very careful consideration before deploying, and is rejected so far. Hardy has no such requirement ('freezing buggy state'), thus is free to receive newer packages. The final goal is to make Gutsy "Stably Buggy", not changing buggy state all the time.[url=https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/gutsy/ source/aumix/ bug/145805/comments/12]https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/gutsy/ source/aumix/ bug/1...[/url] |
| vainrveenr Apr 12, 2010 3:23 PM EDT |
Quoting:Of course failing to fix bugs or packaging code that isn't ready for prime time are technical issues.And APTly related to this, even Ubuntu's parent distro, Debian GNU/Linux, is faced with the technical issues of fixing release-critical bugs both in testing AND in stable(!) See more on this at Debian's 'Release-critical bugs status' graph found at http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/ It certainly seems from this that at least Debian's technical issues are very much transparent for all to see. |
| Steven_Rosenber Apr 13, 2010 12:54 AM EDT |
Just the same, I don't think there's much if any bug-fixing in a Debian release once it's gone stable. |
| caitlyn Apr 13, 2010 1:12 AM EDT |
@Steven: I'm not a Debian user so I really don't know if you're right. Assuming you are all that demonstrates is that Debian suffers from the same disease as Ubuntu. Leaving bugs unfixed in a supported distro is just plain wrong and is a recipe for unhappy users. |
| bigg Apr 13, 2010 6:26 AM EDT |
But with Debian the philosophy is to release when it's ready. For Ubuntu, it's release every six months regardless of whether it is ready. |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 13, 2010 6:53 AM EDT |
Bigg is correct. The Debian and Ubuntu policies are the same. Stable is stable. No fixes except security fixes, usually. But Debian releases when it's ready, meaning that most bugs have been shaken out and it is rock and rock solid. Ubuntu ships when the deadline hits. Buggy or not. Debian would never release in a similar state as Ubuntu. |
| devnet Apr 13, 2010 9:18 AM EDT |
So we know 3 things now... 1. Ubuntu releases in 6 month cycles and doesn't fix high-priority bugs 2. Everyone (mostly) thinks not fixing these bugs is fine (or not Ubuntu's fault) 3. Some people wait to install the released version until later when all the bugs are worked out With #3 above, I think it's pretty obvious that Ubuntu's QA is horrible if people have to do this. Imagine if, when you bought a car, you didn't drive said car until later after "all the recalls and bugs were fixed". Would it be practical to drive that car? In the same vein, it is not practical to 'drive' the latest Ubuntu release? To me this is unacceptable. If I had bought a car like this, I'd return it and use something else. The fact that a majority of users out there _DON'T_ use something else means they are either ultimately stupid or a glutton for punishment. Taking #1 and #2 into consideration, It is OBVIOUS that Ubuntu is _NOT_ a distribution of Linux that should be offered to new users...and this is something I've been saying since version 5.04...I'm just glad everyone is finally catching up. I would also recommend Mandriva 2010 for new Linux users. |
| Steven_Rosenber Apr 13, 2010 11:11 AM EDT |
The thing with Debian, though, is they're releasing when "ready." But what constitutes ready? If everything on the install image - say in the default desktop - meets this standard, than that is very powerful indeed. I wonder how Debian deals with the whole of the distribution - the 20,000+ packages that aren't part of the default installation. However much we might be uncomfortable with a Stable release only doing security patches and not adding features or even fixing bugs is the very real issue of regressions, which we've all experienced. So there's a good reason for the whole concept of a stable release. What I wonder is the relative importance of this method for desktop as opposed to server. I don't know what sysadmins are doing these days, but way back if they wanted to run Apache, they compiled it themselves with exactly the version and features they wanted. Maybe today there is greater use of precompiled packages even on servers. It sure makes installation and patching easier. Not that desktops aren't as mission-critical, and especially in enterprise/business uses there are applications and tasks that must keep working and are coded in such a way that updated packages elsewhere in the system can make them perform poorly or not at all. I'm having just such a problem with Firefox 3.6.x - I have a Web-based app that works with 3.5.x but not 3.6.x. And since the developers really only care about IE, there's probably not going to be a fix. So when I was running FreeBSD 7.3-release last week, having a choice of 3.6.x and 3.5.x (and even 3.0.x) in the package repository was both helpful and a way around problems with regressions in newer versions of the package. |
| tuxchick Apr 13, 2010 11:31 AM EDT |
The other problem with Firefox is plugins that get broken with Firefox updates. You have your fave extensions, use them a lot, then Firefox issues a "you must update or the sky will fall!" announcement. After the update your fave extensions don't work anymore. Makes me wonder what kind of craziness is going on under the hood. |
| jdixon Apr 13, 2010 12:29 PM EDT |
>... it's pretty obvious that Ubuntu's QA is horrible if people have to do this. Horrible is a rather strong word. Ubuntu's QA compares quite favorably with most closed source software I've used, for example. I reserve horrible for those software companies which actually deserve it, say Adobe and Microsoft. > The fact that a majority of users out there _DON'T_ use something else means they are either ultimately stupid or a glutton for punishment. Or they're former Windows users, in which case they're used to it. > I'm having just such a problem with Firefox 3.6.x - I have a Web-based app that works with 3.5.x but not 3.6.x. While my online banking site works fine with 3.0 and 3.6, but won't work at all with 3.5. :( |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 13, 2010 1:04 PM EDT |
Quoting:2. Everyone (mostly) thinks not fixing these bugs is fine (or not Ubuntu's fault) I don't think this is fine actually. It's fine for Debian because they "release when ready". It's not fine for Ubuntu with a 6 month deadline. Quoting:The thing with Debian, though, is they're releasing when "ready." But what constitutes ready? It's more powerful. It applies to the whole 25,000+ package repository. All of that is Debian. It's not split like in the Ubuntu world where you have supported and contributed applications. Debian releases all of it, or none of it. What happens to be on the CD is an entirely different matter. Especially if you consider that many people use the net-install CD which only carries the minimum required packages needed to download everything from the net. Quoting:I don't know what sysadmins are doing these days, but way back if they wanted to run Apache, they compiled it themselves with exactly the version and features they wanted. Maybe today there is greater use of precompiled packages even on servers. It sure makes installation and patching easier. I think that many will use precompiled packages, or they compile their own and stuff them in a separate repository. Luckily software like Apache has become much more modular. You can simply load and unload modules at runtime. You don't even need to restart! So there is a lower need for compiling your own. Quoting:The other problem with Firefox is plugins that get broken with Firefox updates. You have your fave extensions, use them a lot, then Firefox issues a "you must update or the sky will fall!" announcement. After the update your fave extensions don't work anymore. I just wish that the "update firefox" screen would show if (and which) extensions are compatible with the version they want you to upgrade to. |
| Steven_Rosenber Apr 13, 2010 3:55 PM EDT |
My unsuccessful dist-upgrade notwithstanding, the progress from Debian Etch, through Lenny and now Squeeze is huge - and really nice to see. Even though Ubuntu is slagged for taking credit for the work that Debian is doing, as much as Ubuntu stands on the shoulders of Debian, in turn Debian stands on the shoulders of all the upstream projects that make up a usable Linux distribution. None of the full-OS projects/distributions, be they based on Linux or a BSD, can stand alone - it's a huge, interconnected world of projects. |
| chalex Apr 13, 2010 4:47 PM EDT |
Quoting:With #3 above, I think it's pretty obvious that Ubuntu's QA is horrible if people have to do this. Imagine if, when you bought a car, you didn't drive said car until later after "all the recalls and bugs were fixed". Would it be practical to drive that car? In the same vein, it is not practical to 'drive' the latest Ubuntu release? To me this is unacceptable. If I had bought a car like this, I'd return it and use something else. The fact that a majority of users out there _DON'T_ use something else means they are either ultimately stupid or a glutton for punishment. Wait, what?!? That's a terrible analogy! If we must use car analogies, it's more like this: "imagine someone gave you an awesome car for free, with leather seats and Bluetooth, that worked well, even better than the USD15000 car you could go buy from the dealer, but the engine shut off any time you tried to drive on street names that began with the letter 'z'". I can't believe so many people here are looking the gift horse in the mouth. |
| caitlyn Apr 13, 2010 7:36 PM EDT |
Gift horse or Trojan Horse? Seriously, there are a ton of distros out there that just plain do a better job than Ubuntu, including ones aimed at newbies. Ubuntu really and truly is no big deal and it's high time the community make people aware that it is simply one choice in many. |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 14, 2010 4:03 AM EDT |
I still recommend Ubuntu to newbies, for one simple reason: googleability. If they have a problem they can very easily search for it in google and usually get back plenty of results to help them out. It makes it easier for new users to help themselves. |
| gus3 Apr 14, 2010 9:39 AM EDT |
Quoting:I still recommend Ubuntu to newbies, for one simple reason: googleability.Fedora is good for that, too. |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 14, 2010 11:10 AM EDT |
True, but Fedora is a bit bleeding edge for my taste. |
| jdixon Apr 14, 2010 11:16 AM EDT |
> True, but Fedora is a bit bleeding edge for my taste. Personally, I consider that somewhat of an understatement. :) Though pretty much anything which applies to Ubuntu should also work with Mint, so you could always recommend it. |
| bigg Apr 14, 2010 11:39 AM EDT |
I strongly recommend Mint over Ubuntu as well. It's just better. And yes, almost all of the Ubuntu fixes also apply to Mint. |
| gus3 Apr 14, 2010 11:58 AM EDT |
Quoting:> True, but Fedora is a bit bleeding edge for my taste.And then there's Slackware{,64}-current. |
| jdixon Apr 14, 2010 4:06 PM EDT |
> And then there's Slackware{,64}-current. Well, yeah. But it works. :) |
| gus3 Apr 14, 2010 4:40 PM EDT |
Quoting:Well, yeah. But it works. :)Usually, but there is no promise of having heavily tested updates. Right now, the shipping 32-bit huge kernels are having trouble loading the sunrpc, auth_rpcgss, and nfsd kernel modules, complaining about "invalid module format". Patrick V. is working on a fix before the next -current update. |
| azerthoth Apr 14, 2010 7:54 PM EDT |
Fedora ... bleeding edge ... I need to check for major hemorrhaging I guess. Of all the things I have called fedora, bleeding edge has never been one of them. |
| hkwint Apr 14, 2010 8:24 PM EDT |
Thanks Caitlyn, I'm all happy now! About time based / ready based releases: It's not all that important. Debian release management is pretty bad when it comes to communication: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/116126/#debian which leads to part of it not being ready on time. It _ought_ to release whenever everything is ready or not at all, but for i18n that surely wasn't the case at Valentine's day '09, mainly because of communication / planning problems. Apart from the fact it was postponed for months. Not fixing bugs is not acceptable, but I'm not sure postponing software for months on the other hand is. OpenBSD has the same release scheme as Ubuntu, and still manages to bring upgrades which don't break stuff as far as I understood. And if it does break stuff, it's at least well documented how to proceed fixing it. No matter if you run Ubuntu, Debian, OpenBSD, or buy an iPad/PS3, 'waiting a while before buying it' is always a good thing. For Debian because a few days after release whole translation is done, for Ubuntu for the mentioned reasons, for OpenBSD because there will be more discussion about upgrading issues on the web, for iTab/PS3 because the first models overheated, and newer models didn't have this issue, and when it came to the PS3 were even cheaper. Just to show it's not a 'software-only' problem. Even after products are tested (where I worked, we simulated 7 years of use within a few weeks, and a 'small' test market followed), unforeseen problems might still occur after market introduction, and these should be fixed for the following releases. |
| hkwint Apr 14, 2010 8:26 PM EDT |
AZ: You gotta be kidding. Fedora has much more bleeding edge than Gentoo! Newer kernels, it ships with Xorg 1.8 which even isn't in portage yet, it had Nouveau as standard driver before I could even find documentation about how to do it on Gentoo, you get the idea. I strongly suggest you make the necessary checks as mentioned. |
| jdixon Apr 14, 2010 10:01 PM EDT |
> Usually, but there is no promise of having heavily tested updates. True. Running current is like running rawhide or cooker. You're going to get bitten eventually. Unless there's a good reason, I don't bother. Heck, I'm still on 12.2, for various reasons (one being I expect to have a newer machine to try 13.0 out on shortly). |
| devnet Apr 15, 2010 9:30 AM EDT |
Quoting:Wait, what?!? That's a terrible analogy! If we must use car analogies, it's more like this: "imagine someone gave you an awesome car for free, with leather seats and Bluetooth, that worked well, even better than the USD15000 car you could go buy from the dealer, but the engine shut off any time you tried to drive on street names that began with the letter 'z'". You're right, I should have made it clear the 'selection' of a model of car was the idea here not the money. |
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