On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 05:28 -0800, Christopher Stone wrote:
The last bug I submitted to Ray Strode took an *extremely* long time
to get a very simple bug fixed, I eventually had to call upon some
higher ups at RedHat in order for him to actually apply a patch and
fix the bug. He would not even so much as even reply to the bug
report after months of replys and CCs from other people.
I have dealt with two other RedHat maintainers who also take the same
lackadaisical attitude towards bug fixing. I'm not really sure what
the RedHat engineers actually do over there...but that is for another
discussion I guess...
I would bet that they're running around like chickens with FC6 just out
the door and all the bugfixes on packages that would have a higher
priority than games. If the kernel is broken, that would certainly come
first. Missing config.h is an example of something higher up to resolve,
for backwards compatibility. I doubt they're being discourteous, with
all hell breaking out around them, I would guess they figure you'll
understand where they are presently at. But, months?? That's pretty
crucial. A quickie email to you would have been better to explain just
what was going on... and, respectful.
When I worked there in 2000, we had to have stuff out the door and
resolved within a week, as our target goal in the Tech Support
Department. While things might not actually gotten totally resolved in a
week, there were plenty emails to explain just where the problem was in
the resolution path for RedHat issues. If it was deemed a third party
issue, then that would have been conveyed in an email explaining that.
We weren't 'maintainers'... just a layer of communication between those
with the problems and those able to do something about the problem. That
was mostly during Bob Youngs days when Mathew was just coming on-board.
He's a great guy, but his job is to watch the bottom-line so that
everyone there gets paychecks that won't bounce. I wouldn't have that
job for all the tea in China.
Ric