Not too impressed with the quality of F14 at this time

[Jonathan Kamens]

 On 9/12/2010 3:27 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Sorry to hear you're having trouble. Let's take a look through the bugs.
> I can't reply in line as Evo is being too 'clever' about your table,
Hmm. Maybe you should file a bug about that. ;-)
> 632939 - as Lennart says, seems a bit confused; if you could follow up
> with more information it'd help.
Done.
> 632934 - are you sure this is new?
Not certain. Would have expected to have found another bug about it when
I searched if it wasn't new, but didn't find anything. But you may be
right that it's not new.
> I vaguely recall seeing this message
> all the time. atk is accessibility stuff, so you don't need it if you
> don't need accessibility assistance. I'm not sure if we intend it to be
> installed by default or not. This kind of message isn't *always* a bug
> to be fixed; sometimes apps are set up to just always call something and
> then use it if it turns out to be there but not use it if it isn't, and
> in that case it's not always a problem that there's an error like this.
> Matthias is the right assignee, he should know if this is a problem or
> not.
I don't think GUI apps should be logging seemingly alarming messages
like this to stdout if they aren't actually a problem. If the
possibility that the referenced shared library isn't there is expected
and normal, then attempts to load it should fail silently.
> 632932 - no points for h264 format video ;)
Why? Is there a patent issue? It's the default codec VLC uses when doing
screen captures, and it's also by far the best codec I've found for
capturing this sort of thing. Is there a free alternative with
comparable performance?
> 632236 - this is some kind of kernel timer issue. It may help to attach
> dmesg output to this bug. I suspect it's the kernel rather than procps
> at fault, so I've reassigned it (we can always assign it back if I'm
> wrong). It would be useful to know if it happens if you boot with
> 'nohz=off' or 'clocksource=acpi_pm' .
Can't test this right now because I'm at work and can't reboot remotely
because of bug 630225, but I will try to test this as soon as possible
and update the ticket.
> 630253 - matthias has bumped this one upstream and upstream is asking
> for details: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628984 . Note
> this isn't universal - it doesn't happen on any of my systems, so
> there's some specific trigger here, so it will definitely help upstream
> if you can provide the info they asked for.
I'll provide it if I can, but I can't reproduce the problem on demand
and have only see it once, so it might be a while before I can get more
data about it.
> 623550 - no idea again, but developer has taken it. Again seems not too
> important?
Not sure how important it is. If there important machine checks being
logged that aren't being propagated promptly into user space by mcelog
because it's not working properly, then that could be a serious problem.
> It seems like only a few of the bugs are really significant - the
> network and gnome-keyring issues - and the devs are working on those.
> The rest read as pretty minor to me; do let us know if any of them are
> more significant than they immediately appear.
You're right that a number of the issues I encountered are seemingly
minor. However, when it comes to software quality, "where there's smoke
there's fire" has rarely gone wrong for me... Lots of seemingly minor
issues with a software system are a pretty good indication of lower
overall quality and therefore a hint that there may be larger, lurking
issues that have not yet been uncovered.
> Even if this isn't new you should file a bug as it's the best way to
> make the developers aware of the issue. If you've already filed a bug
> before, update it to say it still exists in F14.
I will try to do that, but it is somewhat disheartening, because
feedback I've seen here and in bugzilla in the past suggests that the
nouveau driver is not particularly well-maintained and isn't likely to
be any time soon. When it comes to taking the time to file good bugs,
nobody likes to feel like they're wasting time on bugs that aren't ever
going to be addressed.

Thanks very much for the detailed response, Adam.

  jik