about bug reporters reporting bugs against reportbug
The last days, Debian suffered a bug in the reportbug package which made it fail in postinst. This bug was promptly fixed, but reported like THIRTEEN times as a bug in the BTS. If I were reportbug maintainer, I'd have gone ballistic at this ignorance of bug reporters.
Guys, all of you who have reported this bug are running Debian unstable, an unreleased development version of your distribution. Is it asking too much to follow basic etiquette to look in the BTS whether a fatal bug might already been reported? I mean, THIRTEEN nearly identical reports?
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Joachim Breitner on :
Maybe they were just reportbug users, and without reportbug they had no chance of seend other reportbug bugs as reportbug would usually tell them, so they reported the reportbug bug without reportbug's help anyways...
nomeata
ndim on :
There is no mutex for bug reports, so that may just have been a race condition.
Hans Bonfigt on :
Perhaps it is necessary to submit bug reports more than\nonce. Recently, Debian messed up the entiire X Wndow\nSystem by rendering xdm unusable. The bug report was\nout a few hours later but nothing happened for several\nweeks.\nActually, X is broken again. Upon installing Xorg-com-\nmon, 'xfs-xtt' is removed. 'xfs' cannot be used instead\nbecause it delivers garbled fonts.\nWhether or not I write a bug report - who cares ?\nAnd, more important:\nNo bug report will ever resolve the architectural\nproblem caused by violations of several abstraction\nlayers. In fact, neither the X desktop manager nor\nany X font server have any dependencies to the X\nServer. Obviously, you can run both programs com-\npletely without an X Server. Moreover, this is the\nstandard Installation - or did you ever see a server\nwith a X Server installed ?\nThe multiply-dependency problem leads straight to\na windows-prone stability. Debian is not 'deterministic'\nany more.\nYour definition of security is well known, my definition\nof security is primarily "Availeability of services" and\n"Deterministical behaviour".\nWhile Debian "Sarge" cannot be used anymore as an\n application server, Debian "etch", which appeared to\nme (and our customers) to be very stable and reliable,\nis achtually far, far away from these goals.\n\nGreetings from Nuremberg,\nHans Bonfigt
Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber on :
What is the bug number?
Debian testing and unstable are currently in a state of one of the biggest transitions ever.
Debian does.
Did you report this? How was this handled by the people running the Distribution?
Explain this.
So you are mixing up safety and security. Which is a common mistake by Germans since we say "Sicherheit" for both.
Why?
Debian "etch" is an unreleased development version. And at the moment, it is developing.
disgruntled delusioner on :
I feel your pain. I have been teaching math to first-graders for THIRTY years. And, can you believe it! Every time new students arrive, despite these THIRTY years I have spent teaching, those little devils STILL make the same mistakes!
Stephen Touset on :
The problems with reportbug seemed to be just a simple Python indentation issue. After fixing that (and adding a colon after one if statement), I tried filing a bug report on another package.
Amusingly enough, after doing so, reportbug would enter an infinite loop whereupon it would send email after email to the BTS system, never terminating. I sent probably 15 identical bug reports to the linux-image maintainers before I realized it was duplicating the reports ad nauseum.