Thoughts on a hardware-specific bugzilla?

[Bastien Nocera]

On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 15:33 -0400, Stewart Adam wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been working out a few hardware bugs on a new laptop lately, and I
> thought it would be interesting to create a specific category/product in
> the current bugzilla for hardware bugs. Various components could be
> listed as the different hardware categories (wifi, screen/backlight,
> trackpad, keyboard, speakers, etc) and this way hardware issues could be
> tracked separately from software bugs. Hopefully, this would help
> hardware bugs be resolved faster and it would be a good step forward for
> getting more computers to work out of the box on a standard Fedora
> install. Do you think it's worth it?

We're pretty good at pushing things upstream, so maybe you're better off
filing bugs directly in the Fedora bugzillas.

I used a tracker in a product that's only available internally to track
issues with my Dell Latitude D420[1] when I got it, but it wasn't very
useful. You might be better off:
- Creating a wiki page for it
- Telling sites like tuxmobile about it
- and making sure all the issues get filed (maybe with work-arounds in
the wiki page itself)

The main point is that all those laptops/machines should work
out-of-the-box, so anything that we can do in Fedora to make that better
should be taken seriously.

I remember working on various issues for an older Sony Vaio laptop
(S1XP) that didn't work that well with FC2. By the time for FC4,
everything on it was working out-of-the-box.

Note that Red Hat have a number of people interested in making this work
well (hey Richard and Matthew!), so all the fixes, would be upstreamed
in due time. It also makes it easier for us to move problems between
components (is the backlight not working a kernel, a hal, a hal-info, or
an Xorg driver problem?).

> (Just to clarify, by "hardware bugs" I mean things like missing device
> IDs from kernel source files, suspend quirks, display backlight control,
> missing sound, or a component not being detected at all. Devices
> malfunctioning in Linux due to a driver bug would fall under software
> bugs IMO) 

Wiki pages with links to bugs is the way to go, and allows us to update
easily, and discuss problems related to the device.

[1]: For that laptop, we got the backlight working in HAL, Rfkill
support in HAL as well, hints in hal-info for the WWAN driver, and a lot
of device driver updates. All of which have been upstreamed.