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Re: Bugzilla and build bugs


On Tue, 21 Feb 2012, David Miller wrote:

> From: Roland McGrath <roland@hack.frob.com>
> Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:38:47 -0800 (PST)
> 
> > Building glibc is particularly fraught with peril, far more so than
> > the average package that follows GNU configure conventions.
> 
> To be honest this is often GLIBC's fault, and thus is a real bug even
> if a so-called "clueless user" ran into the problem.
> 
> Not having the correct dependencies, uptodate versions of tools, or
> what-have-you are aspects that ought to be checked in the configure
> scripts.
> 
> Therefore a "stupid user" build failure is often an indication of a
> lacking check or verification in glibc itself, and thus a legitimate
> bug.
> 
> I also recall that the first person who reported the __i686 conflict
> was labelled as a stupid user.
> 
> Actually, I consider build failures the most critical kind of problem
> because it needlessly dwindles your pool of potential testers.

Indeed, all agreed.

The handling of build failures is something that should *not* be 
controversial at all.  They are bugs, they should be handled as bugs, we 
should not have a default attitude that users are presumed clueless and 
should be sent somewhere else.  A bug tracker works better than a mailing 
list for tracking the discussion of a problem.

Having bug 333 at all reflected a dysfunctionality in glibc development.  
We were closing build bugs as duplicates of 333 just because "that's how 
we've always done things here", rather than considering each bug report 
properly on its merits.  I hope we will consider such bug reports on their 
merits in future.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com


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