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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I find the response of the maintainer to be typical of the kind of detached attitude that you come across every now and then with issues reported.

I've had bugs converted to 'wontfix' and 'unconfirmed' in spite of giving detailed info and / or situations where it clearly is a bug.

It shouldn't take a 'thinking over a cup of tea' to recognize this is highly undesirable behaviour, a fix is practically free and very easy, the results of executing that script are potentially very expensive.

It's a bug. Not a feature for the wishlist.

And I never did get why there has to be yet another way to start stuff up in the first place. /etc/inittab, /etc/init.d/ and now 'upstart'...

It doesn't seem to be a great improvement over the previous system but requires a bunch of new stuff to be learned and old stuff to be unlearned. That should come with a clear advantage of sorts and I can't seem to find any.

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One nice feature of upstart is its ability to start services, disk checks, etc, in parallel. This will dramatically decrease boot times on modern systems. ( http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/57213 )

Read the whole thread before giving out about this lad. He did change his mind: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/55717...

Changing his mind (without hinting that he may have been wrong) was a step in the right direction, and he did propose a clean fix that will prevent other similar bugs, but he flagged this as a wishlist which shows that he still doesn't consider it to be of major importance. He could always safeguard the script and treat his suggestion as a wishlist item, which would have been more reasonable.

The absurd thing is that one simple, proposed patch (#20) is just a few lines of actual code - far less than all the "blah blah blah" attached to the bug report.

It fixes the problem now but does nothing to prevent the same problem showing up again in another script. Good maintainers are careful about putting some band-aid over a problem instead of fixing it. And from what he said it seems he rather plans fixing it in Upstart instead of having to patch scripts every-time. That does not sound absurd to me.

Personally I don't care whether he admits he was wrong or not. I do care that the bug is fixed.

And frankly some of the comments in that bug are going the route of personal attacks against the maintainter, which I don't think is very productive.

"Don't Do That Then" is productive?

Not only is it not productive, it's disingenuous. After all, tihs is a bug that in the worst of cases you're going to be hit by only once (unless you're a masochist), so whoever you tell 'don't do that then' that has just experienced your bug already knows that.

It's the people that haven't experienced it yet that are at risk, and you can't tell those 'don't do that then' preemptively.

Well, although the maintainer's initial responses weren't very helpful it seems that the bug had already been fixed.

I guess it was really just a case of a bad day after all but he handled it gracefully in the end. This recent post clarifies things: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/55717...

I did read the whole thread, hence the bit about it not being a thing for the 'wishlist'.

The specific bug was fixed elsewhere (if you check the updates to the bug report).

All that has happened was that didn't get properly referenced and the changes to priority suggested that the bug wasn't being addressed. Someone has just jumped on that ;)

It happens.

I can understand how something you have to really make an effort to blow up does not make the urgent list. It would never have occurred to me to go about running random startup scripts manually. I am not a Linux Hacker - but neither are most other Ubuntu users. My reaction to "hm, installation/upgrade did not work" would be to revert to the old version.

Not dissing the people who try to find the errors and fiddle around - they are the ones who advance the state of Linux in the long run. But it's probably a good idea to use a test system for fiddling around.

/etc/inittab, /etc/init.d/ and now 'upstart'...

Don't forget daemontools.

Daemontools is nice because it works fine as a init.d replacement, and you can just run the individual programs when appropriate. I use it to start emacs, offlineimap, etc., when I log in for the first time.

Ah supervise, thou art wonderful

    daph:/etc/service# svstat *
    apache: up (pid 20546) 7315393 seconds
    dndr: up (pid 32629) 3757174 seconds
    getmail: up (pid 31632) 4487516 seconds
    momo: up (pid 22310) 16934 seconds
    mush: up (pid 10708) 222304 seconds
    p9: down 7991823 seconds, normally up
    u9fs: up (pid 13547) 1968001 seconds
    win2k: up (pid 3291) 8180332 seconds

Seems like it can stand in as both your init daemon and your process monitor, replacing (for example) supervisord. I guess that means one less config file, at least?

Yay open source! Yay linux!

This is why I'm slowly backing away from anything to do with linux.

We may have flippant maintainers once in a while, but open-source is actually a protection against that, not a liability.

Anyone can take care of this bug and release their own patches and spins with any given bug or set of bugs or set or features implemented/removed/whatever in open-source. If you get a flippant maintainer of, say, a component of Windows, you're just going to have wait until one of his bosses decides a given bug is a large enough threat to the company to demand it gets fixed. This can be a very, very long time, especially where only edge cases are affected, where you have no option to do anything but beg someone to listen to you. With open-source software, you can fix it yourself, you can hire someone else to fix it, you can put something else in its place, you can do anything! One of these options is obviously better.

> open-source is actually a protection against that, not a liability

Theoretically, but in practice open source software is decidedly worse at this sort of thing than OS X or Windows. I suspect that the profit motive is a driving factor here. You can tell that this maintainer does not care or lacks the capacity to empathize at all about his users. Maybe because they are not the ones paying the bills?

Hmm? Could you care to explain your reasoning? Are you speaking of bug counts per lines of code? Or something else?

In my eyes, I'm glad that this bug report is in the wild. I'm glad microsoft employees are waving this around in our faces because look how many lives this bug report will save. Look how many people won't get bit by this bug now that they know about it. On the other hand, I can't explain how many times I've used Microsoft's installers, following the instructions to the T only to wind up with broken software or even yes, trashed filesystems.

Perhaps you're right. Maybe open source software is more buggy than our middle-management-driven alternatives. But at least we aren't afraid to warn people of its faults. I think the fact that we don't need to cover critical bugs like this up to keep profits high says something positive about this model of development.

> Are you speaking of bug counts per lines of code? Or something else?

I speak of incidents I've read about and incidents experienced myself. These are not statistics, but they satisfy me.

> I'm glad microsoft employees are waving this around in our faces

Where? Or is this the standard OSS "everyone who criticizes Linux is a secret Microsoft employee" line of thinking?

> Look how many people won't get bit by this bug now that they know about it

Falsely assuming that a significant number of those with the potential to be affected actually know about it . . .

> following the instructions to the T only to wind up with broken software or even yes, trashed filesystems.

Somehow most other people manage to do it without many problems.

> But at least we aren't afraid to warn people of its faults . . .

I believe Microsoft and Apple's KB systems are more complete and well organized than Ubuntu's bug-tracker.

> critical bugs like this

You may not need to cover them, but you're also the only ones who actually have them in significant number. I prefer an organization that cares enough to prevent the bugs from happening but does not disclose them to one where the bugs are disclosed then ignored with insults.

Oh, I see where you're coming from. Sorry, I didn't mean no flamin'. Let me clarify my points real quick, then I'll go back to my n00bishness with my 5 precious karma and my fiery tongue.

>> I'm glad microsoft employees are waving this around in our faces

>Where? Or is this the standard OSS "everyone who criticizes Linux is a secret Microsoft employee" line of thinking?

Oops, I forgot to mention my source. That was from the bug report itself, comment 18 -- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/55717... -- in which someone was alerted to the bug because a Microsoft employee poked some fun about it.

> > Look how many people won't get bit by this bug now that they know about it

> Falsely assuming that a significant number of those with the potential to be affected actually know about it . . .

I think most competent system administrators who would invoke such a script (it was not an automatic action, this bug is triggered by explicitly running a script that was introduced in the latest unreleased ubuntu version) probably read either reddit or digg or hackernews and would likely know about this very popular bug by now. Which is an advantage because now they won't be bitten by it.

> Somehow most other people manage to do it without many problems.

Guess I'm not one of them.

> I believe Microsoft and Apple's KB systems are more complete and well organized than Ubuntu's bug-tracker.

Perhaps you're right. You have more experience with them. I haven't even seen their bug trackers, and likely wouldn't have access to them unless I were a Microsoft or Apple employee. That's how most proprietary companies' bug trackers work.

> You may not need to cover them, but you're also the only ones who actually have them in significant number.

Funny, I thought all software was buggy? At least, the stuff I write sure is.

> I prefer an organization that cares enough to prevent the bugs from happening but does not disclose them to one where the bugs are disclosed then ignored with insults.

Fair enough. But to be honest, this is not an organization we're dealing with here. This is not a system we're criticizing here. This is the problem of one maintainer's silly response to a simple problem. No reason to blame the entire system for one maintainer's bad day.

No software is bug free. But I personally would rather either submit a patch (you can do that with open-source software) or poke a maintainer (a living breathing doorway into the code and the development process) than navigate through Apple corporation's or Microsoft corporation's complete and well-organized knowledge bases or bug tracking systems only to find out this programmer might not feel like fixing that bug and there's nothing more I could do.

Oh wait, I guess I contradicted myself there. Bah, you know what I meant; I'm still new to this 'arguing with people over the Internet' thing and you hacker newsies are quite an incredibly perceptive bunch.

I have used at work both MSDN and Microsoft KB in the past. I wouldn't say they are more complete than launchpad (bigger, yes, more complete, no). And they certainly are not better organized, finding anything in MSDN is painful.

Not so much. Im dealing with a vendor right now -- we have paid support, and have spent thousands with them. As a developer, I have sent several fairly deep/detailed questions about their api and code. The response has been alternating evasions and attacks on my "style" for not using the api the way they intended.

If this is what profit motive gets me, I'll stick with "for the love of it" motive any day. There are jerks everywhere, at least with OSS I'm not paying for the privelege.

(The fact I'm using the vendor's stuff wrong is entirely possible, but the training supposedly included in our support package keeps getting delayed so I can't be certain how to properly use it).

Just like with open source, you have some great companies in the closed source world and not so great ones (and outright lousy ones).

The 'after sales support' factor in closed source is a huge one and it is a good indicator of long term success of a company.

If you follow the MACENTERPRISE mailing list, you might come to a different conclusion about Apple's responsiveness to bugs.

Or, how about response to the vulnerabilities exploited in pwn2own? Firefox got fixed in about a week, but Safari is still unpatched.

Indeed, this is the sort of fiasco Microsoft wishes that money could buy. "I'm a PC ... because Windows DOESN'T wipe all your data without asking first. "

But I think your comment is still vast overkill. The fact is, I get really, really worried every time I see a BSOD'd airline departures board or worse, an ATM booting up Windows (usually Win 2000). Don't these people know?! That there's another OS out there called (GNU/)Linux and it's fast and free and doesn't have a long tradition of crap engineering?

And then I see this and remember that while Linux is (mostly) well-engineered, it has all sorts of equally well-engineered, completely unmarked "self-destruct" buttons. And if there's anything scarier than Windows near airplanes, it has to be Windows users near Linux near airplanes.

if there's anything scarier than Windows near airplanes, it has to be Windows users near Linux near airplanes

... an all-time great quote

I doubt that the license cost of Windows factors much into ATM design.

does the beta label mean anything?

Good luck trying to discuss with Microsoft about the implementation of some step in the Windows boot sequence. In fact, good luck trying to find out details about such implementation.

I guess "out of sight, out of mind" works for you.

Yes, because it's either Microsoft or Linux.

Subsitute "Linux" by "Any FOSS OS" and "Microsoft" by "Any Closed Source OS". The reasoning stands.

lol, who let the stupid troll in here

Did you notice the part where it was fixed with 5 lines in 5 minutes instead of waiting a few months for the vendor ?

What a sucky display of moderation here, -4, really ? So what if you disagree with the guy, he's backing away from linux for a fairly good reason.

I'm writing this on an ubuntu box in a microsoft free house, in case anybody suspects me of astroturfing for ms.

It should be possible to criticize linux and / or state that you are 'leaving the fold' without getting modded in to the ground.

Open source and linux are great imo, but there is still lots that could be done a whole lot better, and maintainer 'king of the realm' attitude is a fairly large problem.

It's all too often true that if your 'itch' isn't the exact same as the maintainers that it will not get scratched.

I suspect that if he had left out the "yay Open source" bit and just said, "This is why I am slowly backing off blah" he wouldn't get as many downvotes, though it would still be a vacuous statement.

Sure it is a matter of tone, but downvoting for tone does happen and I am not sure it is a bad thing. As it is he sounds like (NB: not saying he is, just sounds like) some immature fellow passing by from reddit knocking Open Source/Linux without adding any value to the discussion. I would expect a comment like "Yay Apple! Yay Steve Jobs! This is why I don't use OSX" to be downvoted too.

And even without the "yay" bit, his comment doesn't add much and has close to zero information content. It is equivalent to someone saying "this" or "upvoted" or "+ 1" or "me too" to something someone else said.

Such comments do get downvoted on HN. I don't have an opinion either way though I wouldn't care if it got downvoted to -4 or stays at +1. Anything above that would be scary!

> Anything above that would be scary!

We agree on that :)

I tend to look at the factual content of a contribution and less at the tone. It's like the RMS/Miguel de Icaza thing but in miniature, if you 'leave' open source after having used it you're almost worse than if you were a windows user all your life long, and I think the moderation in part demonstrates that. If it's just about the tone that's different, but since 'tone' is hard to gage it's a bad reason to moderate for, unless it is crystal clear that the words are offensive or rude. In this case 'linux' and 'open source' are not people, so they can't be insulted and 'yay open source, yay linux' can be interpreted as showing that not everything is good and great about linux and open source, which is undeniably true.

It's significant in this case because in closed source there is usually a solid ($) reason to keep your customers satisfied, in open source much less so because plenty of the people there do it on a volunteer basis, so you have to be 'happy you got it in the first place'.

"I tend to look at the factual content of a contribution and less at the tone."

Well even with that filter there isn't much "content" to that comment besides "me too". :-)

" 'yay open source, yay linux' can be interpreted as showing that not everything is good and great about linux and open source, which is undeniably true."

Well isn't this true about everything in the world? Not everything is good and great about $X. I (vehemently!) agree, but by itself, that isn't a very useful thing to say. Coupled with the "script kiddie" tone, it is hard to fault downvoters (imo)!

Fair enough!

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