On Sun, 4 Nov 2012, Salvo Tomaselli <[email protected]> wrote: > > Linux/open source developers are usually not interested in fixing bugs if > > they cannot easily reproduce them. This problem plagues virtually all > > Open Source projects. > > Well in proprietary software you are usually required to blindly purchase > an upgrade and hope that the bugs afflicting you have been fixed.
It's actually worse than that. Sometimes a major upgrade to commercial software is impossible due to dependencies on other software and the vendor refuses to provide a minor fix. One example that I encountered was a memory leak in syslogd on Solaris 2.6. It probably would have been easy for me to fix if I had the source, but it was proprietary. It couldn't be upgraded because major upgrades to a working system are always painful and because we weren't sure that the proprietary applications would work well. So I put in a cron job to restart the buggy daemon. After upgrading the network in question to Linux there were no problems like that. On Sun, 4 Nov 2012, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote: > These sorts of articles seem to always be written as if the author > honestly expects the list to be some sort of profound revelation. That no > one even realizes these problems exist, and that now that they've been > identified and put into a list, this will somehow be helpful in solving > them. For every difficult problem there is a simple solution which is wrong. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
