Quick heads-up: Ubuntu memory leak issue

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if it's worth that; so far I haven't seen any story which
> actually comes out and claims the bug is in Fedora. I just wanted to
> provide an explanation in case it comes up. There was one comment on a
> fairly obscure news article -
> http://techie-buzz.com/foss/ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx-hit-by-major-memory-leak-problem.html - which claimed Fedora was affected, but that's all.

Blame me for that obscure blog.

Hopeful this all blows over and the notoriety that the Ubuntu big has
gotten in the last few days doesn't morph into some sort of "common
knowledge" that Red Hat/Fedora has this bug and Ubuntu ended up
catching it and we didn't.  The wording of the launchpad ticket leaves
a lot of room to make poor judgements about the pedigree of this
particular patchset. As evidenced in the comments of that blog
article.

phoronix I think is the oldest article I can find from April 21st and
I think other blogs have picked it up from there and are
rebroadcacsting it .  Blogs being what they are, I really don't want
to see the poor choice of wording in the Launchpad ticket get
mischaracterized in an effort to sensationalize a story and drive blog
readership at the expense of... reality.

And In case this ends up infesting back channel communications like
blog comment areas, twitter or irc...any place where crowdsourced
misinformation breeds and propagates... I do not want comments like
the one in that blog to be repeated without having a rebuttal a quick
google search away.  Does it need to be a press release? No.  It's not
really appropriate to rub Debian or Ubuntu's noses in picking up an
intermediate patchset and running with it.  But having an easily
searchable wiki page at hand for reference would be something nice to
have...just in case I need to politely educate someone who chooses to
make statements not supported by fact.

But I do like the QA story about how our testing repository worked to
help iterate a solution inside our new pre-release branching workflow.
 That's a nice positive story. If we can tell it without referencing
the problems others have had in this area, I think that would be a
good positive affirmation for our QA team and the new workflow
introduced in F13.

-jef