FC3 disappointment: KsCD locks system; grip; CDROM in general.

[Peter Jones]

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 23:04 -0600, Thomas Cameron wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 11:53 -0700, Kim Lux wrote:
> > In my mind there is a big difference between perfection and having a
> > CDROM that doesn't work. 
> 
> Kim -
> 
> I'm sorry but I have not seen others with your CDROM issue with any
> frequency on this or on the fedora users list.  I've installed FC3 (from
> early testing to various RCs to release) on a bunch of machines and on
> every one of them the CD works as you'd expect.

The plural of anecdote is not data; that your machines work with all of
the cd driver code does not mean the code will work with his machine, be
it broken or not.  Let's see about finding what triggers the problems,
rather than having a flamefest about how inconsiderate it is to hope for
working software?

> It sounds to me like *you've* got some sort of gremlin - hardware
> incompatibility, broken drive or somesuch silliness.  This is not the
> developers' or the distro's fault.  It's not your fault.  It's a case
> of "sh*t happens, now move on."

I don't know that, and I've written a noticable chunk of the driver code
he's actually running.  How sure are you that it's not the developers'
fault?

Put another way, just because he's seeing a hardware error, that doesn't
mean it's one that *should* be hit.  The code can still be wrong, and I
find it likely (since he's not seeing errors in Windows) that his
problem is avoidable.

> Did you read the first paragraph at http://fedora.redhat.com?
> 
> "The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open
> source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may
> eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported
> product"

Did you read it?  It doesn't say "don't mention any problems just
because they're pretty complicated and your hardware is questionable",
as far as I can tell.

> Pay special attention to the last sentence.  Fedora is basically Red
> Hat's public beta of technologies which may (or may not) get into RHEL.
> Red Hat and the Fedora team promise best effort, but make no guarantees
> about this software.  

... "best effort" is not telling him to go away without resolving why he
sees a problem that doesn't happen in older versions or with other OSes.

> You're coming across as saying you want all the newest stuff (latest
> KDE) and you want it to run flawlessly.  Guess what?  It ain't gonna
> happen.  If you're hanging out here on the bleeding edge it's going to
> be rough.

He's got "cdparanoia -B" stalling the machine, and a syslog full of
errors.  He's using a kernel and a cdparanoia that we shipped, and this
is a *released* distro.  As much as I'd love to have seen this in the
betas (or before), I really can't fault him here, especially since I'd
really like to find out what's going wrong.

As somebody who's worked on both the kernel and cdparanoia code
involved: please, quit badgering my tester.

> You're busting the team's chops over what appear to me to be a problem
> that doesn't seem to be common.  Move on, man.

It may still be valid, and as it may well be a problem with code I
maintain, I'd just as soon get the info from him that's necessary to
find out (and possibly even debug it) instead of running him off because
it's a corner case.  After all, cdparanoia's code to detect which
command set to use isn't all that great to begin with, so there's a
relatively good chance that it's doing something stupid.

-- 
        Peter