Fedora & Sound: an excercise in frustration

[Josef Bacik]

On 7/21/07, Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-07-21 at 10:58 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > In all these rants, I didn't see any bugzilla reports. Have you filed
> > any?
>
> Yes, of course I did. But if you look closely at my rants, you will see
> that this is not a simple bug, it's deep process problem that would get
> lost in a series of meaningless bugs.
>
> Take the sound problem. I did file a report. I was told to wait for the
> next alsa update. I did. Then it worked. Then it didn't. What would be
> the point of such reports if the same regression keeps coming back?
>
> I can file a few bug reports, but it's completely irrational to expect
> me to do the same thing over and over again at great pain for me when
> the same bugs keeps being reintroduced. It's a waste of time on all
> sides.
>
> It's a process problem, having untold number of frustrated users flood
> bugzilla with reports every update is not the answer. This is why I
> believe this is a more appropriate forum. It is -devel after all...
>

This isn't necessarily a Fedora problem, after all the only thing we
do is package up whats out there and ship it, so if things break its
because upstream breaks.  This is one of the drawbacks of fedora, its
a moving target therefore things are likely to go a little wrong.  If
you are looking for serious stability you will probably want to stick
with RHEL (or centos if you don't want to spend the money).  Fedora is
constantly evolving, and personally to me as a developer thats
awesome, because it means there's always something to fix.  It sounds
like you just want something that works, which is a completely valid
and understandable position.  Unfortunately because we are constantly
changing often times the response you get will be "wait until we
update this package and try it again."  It's helpfull to note the
package versions of things when they fix your problem, so when you
update to a new package and something breaks, you can report it to
bugzilla with "package b worked fine, package a screws my box" and
that way if there isn't an update in the pipeline, we have a decent
place to start in order to give good instructions on moving forward.

I'm sorry you've had such a frustrating experience with Fedora, but
the fact of the matter is that we do not have the wide variety of
hardware available in order to thoroughly test Fedora on every
conceivable setup, that is why we have our test releases, so people
can test them and file bugs and we can get things addressed before we
release.  I think it would be very valuable if you could run those
tests, I know for a fact that the ICH8 driver is constantly changing,
so you have a unique bit of hardware that would be valuable to be
tested with for the upcoming release.  Thank you,

Josef