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Red Hat Linux 7 Infested With Bugs
TBHiX writes "Apparently, according to reports on bugzilla and on linuxnewbie.internet.com, Red Hat 7.0 is being described by some people as one of the buggiest distros they've seen in recent history." Red Hat's point-oh releases have been historically been pretty bad over the years, so I the only thing that surprises me is that people didn't realize it before they downloaded it. The point release has typically been fine, but the bugzilla report lists over a thousand bugs: 200 appearing this week.
Take this as a warning folks: didn't 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 teach you anything? *grin* But a DB with 2500 bugs in it doesn't necessarily mean a buggy distribution either.
The fact is that RedHat is easier to install and easier to administer than Debian for the average user.
Debian is hard to install.
But its administration is tops among linuxes. It is built almost entirely by volunteer system administrators. It is the only linux trivial to upgrade from one distribution to the next.
Off...the best bug spray in the world...just one quick coat, and the bugs don't come back...or a good flyswatter.
The anti-salmon
Bugs per line of code (LOC).
See Emphasizing Software Test Process Improvement... in it, they say:
So, If Windows 2000 was 30 million LOC, you can expect there to be, on average, between 120,000 and 180,000 bugs in the shipping code.
Let's be generous to MS, and say that they have an outstanding development process as decribed in the above paper. Because of this, they manage to reduce the number of bugs by a factor of 50%; so they're only shipping with 60,000 - 90,000 bugs.
Now, let's be even more generous, and assume that only 10% of the bugs actually present in a system is actually ever noticed and reported (BTW, a ridiculously low estimate, IMHO...) This means that W2K should have on the order of 6,000 to 9,000 reported bugs.
Now, contrast that with the latest Red Hat release; buggy as all git out, you know. 2000 reported bugs. You'd have to go back and compare LOC to get a comparable estimate, but I'm guessing that if you count all the various and sundry packages, Red Hat ships at least 30 million LOC in a distro... which would mean that their code, buggy as all sin and scorned by open source hackers everywhere, would contain about one-third of the bugs that W2K contains.
That's why you're buying Linux.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
<OSS_zealotry> .1? Fix 'em yourself.
Why wait for the
</OSS_zealotry>
So, is this another example of considering a product update/release 'beta' after its release, a la Quake3 v1.25? :)
(Graeme et al can claim "it really was a beta" all they want.. but with no mention of it in the readme? c'mon...)
-'fester
It will be increasingly more difficult to manage the distribution configuration as it's size grows. Anyone who works in software development knows this. This is not suprising.
Word to the wise: Don't upgrade if you want stability. However, for desktop users, you probably won't regret it.
(Yes, I know I should be using something other than RH on my desktop. It's just what I have used for quite a while, and I'm used to it.)
With as large of a user base as RedHat has (and increasing), there are bound to be hundreds of horrible stories. But for each horror story, how many more success stories go on that are untold?
Just because the number of bug reports goes up doesn't mean that quality of product has gone down. If a product gets 1 bug report and has 1 user, does that show its quality? No.
But with the RH7.0 release, how many hundreds of thousands tried the product? And we're looking at maybe 255 bugs? Probably less than 50 of which are genuine bugs.
It's easy to hear those who are having problems because they shout the loudest. It's the people who it works for that aren't heard. All the success stories are silent. I'm one of the success stories. I've installed RH7.0 on 4 servers now. (one 486, a P133, one P-3 850, and a big phat $15k dual zeon 550). My installs have been flawless; better than any distro previous (including 6.2). If everyone shouted their successes as loudly as the minority shouts their failures, then RedHat would be overwhelmed with positives (and deaf).
I give a standing ovation for the RH 7.0 release.
Daniel
The original "bug" is equivalent to someone replying to "I'm having (some problem) with Linux" with "I upgraded my Linux to Windows 2000 and the problem went away," here. I can't believe this was posted as a story; it's ridiculous.
Cost of the six MS CD's that do the same thing, until you try to upgrade MS Explorer, Oh hundreds of dollars. OS $100, web server "pro edition" you tell me, Visual Studio who cares, spreadsheet editors, mail servers, DNS.... Way too much money. The days you spend installing it will never be recovered. Documentation, source, not available ever. How many bugs will you find? Tell me when you get to the bottom of your wallet. I had far fewer problems with Red Hat 6.0 and Debian 2.2 than I've ever had with any of MS's pathetic bloatware BSoD producer. Whip! get back on that upgrade treadmill.
You could get a mac or even a sun.
Where are all of these MicroTurds comming from? Has something shifted in the ORedmond Cloud, sending a storm of them down on our heads? What have we done to deserve such posts? Surely the low sales of Win2k were not intedned to disturb the rest of the computing universe?
Why am I responding to such a troll? Because I'm supposed to be doing my homework and it is boring!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Maybe everyone needs to take a look at the Microsoft hating bullshit they've been spouting for YEARS. When Windows 2000 came out, every Linux kiddie on the block was talking about how it had something like 64000 known bugs or something. So everyone has fun with thier lame little names like MicroBug, MicroSloth, Micro$oft, Winblows, etc. Acting like the OpenSource process renders everything 100% bug free and shit, and then look. Every new point zero version of Red Hat has had the same fucking issues. And what do the Linux kiddies say ? Nothing. Maybe you hyprocrites need to look at your own OS of choice and realize that EVERYONE has bugs. I have no problem with Microsoft bashing as long as it's founded. But when you have the kettle calling the pot black, you need to back down a bit.
For reference, I'm a FreeBSD guy, not a big MCSE Microsoft whore. I just don't like all the fscking hyprocricy. Critisize Microsoft for something they alone are guilty for. If you make fun of something because it has bugs, and you don't understand that the bigger the project, the more the bugs, then you're exposing yourself as someone who doesn't know shit about programming.
Moderate this down if you must, I know it could be considered flame-bait, but consider what I've said here. I'm not trolling, I am challenging the Linux community to respond the same way to Red Hat as it did to Microsoft when Windows 2000 came out.
Let me start with the "my views are mine, and do not represent my employer, blah, blah..."
Now, some very hard choices were made for this release, things like i18n support were desperately needed, and so we have a gcc snapshot as the complier. Somehow this makes us evil, whatever. People want 2.4.x asap, and It will likely land before the next release, so we linked against 2.4 headers, so that it can droped in later. Again, evil, I know, how could we even try to make upgrade easier?
Of course, an older gcc is provided as 'kgcc' so that you can compile your kernels.
Okay, what, exactly, do we ship from Red Hat? Why, we ship 2.5 GIGS worth of community developed software in Red Hat Linux 7. THe bugs we track, for the most part, for the OVERWHELMING part, are not in Red Hat written code, they are in community code. I say this with confidence, because most of the software is community code.
Let me ask you, how many times have you heard about a bug in 'screen'? The number is not small, and every one we know about goes into bugzilla, and gets closed when it is decided that either a) it is fixed, or b) we can't fix it. Now, screen is one of many hundreds of packages.
I am very upset with this style of journalism: "Red Hat 7 Infested With Bugs", honestly, is this a tabloid? Anyone who has ever used a bug tracking system KNOWS how this sort of thing goes, and most of those bugs are in everyone else's distros as well, the only differance is that people are shouting about our counting them. So ask yourself, what does it accomplish by posting a story with a title like this, knowing that CmdrTaco understands everything I've just said?
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
It's simple: Redhat (as several other distributions are now doing) is shipping a different compiler for compiling kernels than for general compilation.
You need to edit the kernel Makefile and add the line CC=kgcc (making sure that kgcc is installed on your system). kernel compilations will then proceed without problems.
Although this is surprising to many users, it's actually a good idea. The linux kernel stresses a compiler in ways that a regular program (even something like all of gnome) just can't do. Kernel compilation demands correctness of inlined functions, or preprocessor command parsing, of lock orders. Basically, the kernel uses C as a convenient macro language for assembly much of the time. The compiler's job is to faithfully translate.
Given all of that, the compiler that you want for general purpose compilation is not necessarily the compiler that compiles the kernel best. The kernel and compilers co-evolve. If you follow either the linux-kernel list or any of the gcc or libc lists, you will see that when bugs turn up with kernel compilation, it is as often the case that there is a libc or a gcc bug as a kernel bug. These bugs frequently only turn up in the context of a kernel compile (because who the hell else would do something like that?!?)
Finally, on the subject of the redhat release: RedHat did some dubious things (calling their gcc gcc 2.96 when 2.96 just doesn't exist, thereby forcing the gcc project to renumber their release to 2.97 just to catch any RedHat bugs, eg.). However, I'm steadily impressed by Redhat as a distro (flame me if you want, I don't care). Redhat is a commercial distribution but they release *all* the software they develop as gpl open source (and have set the tone among other distributors to do the same), and have struck a good balance between novelty and stability.
Anyway, that's how to solve your kernel compiling problem (among lots of other stuff).
I have something of a testbed box that occasionally does real world stuff, and it was running RH6.2 quite flawlessly as a mail server with exim (which I even compiled myself, wow I feel so cool, hehe).
:)
It was working great. I wanted to update it, so I redirected mail traffic to the NT mailserver (which I use when my exim one isn't up), and tried to do an update using an over-the-lan FTP install from another machine which had everything downloaded. (thats the only real way to get files to this box, its got no cdrom, I don't have a burner, etc)
Oops.
That rather happily trashed my existing install and made it unbootable by mysteriously dying halfway through. Couldn't get things to come back properly after that.
No big deal, its a testbed box really. So I trashed it, and did a clean install.
Got things back up and running smoothly. Got OpenSSH running again smoothly. Gotta say I like Sawfish. Tried to compile a 2.2.17 kernel to get rid of a lot of the crap that comes by default with RH that I just don't want.
With all kinds of wacky warnings and errors, that failed.
No biggie, figuring something was just wacky, I went back to 2.2.16 that had been working so well for me in RH6.2.
That will compile, but when I do "make modules", there is some other wacky "pasting token" errors, and it fails.
By now I'm starting to get a bit frustrated. Not being a programmer, I don't really know what to do. It just worked before, and now it just doesn't.
So how does this get filed? If there is a bug, I have no idea just where it is. Maybe its in the new version of GCC, maybe its somewhere else. I don't know, and I don't know how to find out. But somewhere, something is wrong, since it worked flawlessly on 6.2 not three hours earlier. I don't think its anything I did, since I did a clean install this system is very much a stock install and not like the ragtag wacky mix of stuff that my 6.2 install had become.
So I dunno, I'm finding it to be a nice release with this one very nagging issue. Everything else has been flawless (well, OpenSSH doesn't like public key encryption if strictmode is on, but I think I'm doing something wrong there).
Tomorrow, I'll go over the bug reports and see if there is something about this happening to somebody else.
I will say that aside from compiling stuff, I'm really liking RH7.0.
(tomorrow I'm also going to see if I can compile exim, if I can't do that, then I'll probabl have to drop back down to RH6.2 until this can be figured out, because I really prefer exim over the NT mailserver I've got working right now.)
sorry about the rambling nature, its late.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
You should know as well as me, that if you install in 1.5GB you install A LOT of unnecessary stuff.
Do a smaller install, or remove the unwanted stuff.
The reason it takes up more space is for instance that the SQL-part has been expanded with MySQL, as it has been made GPL. There are A LOT of new multimedia-applications etc.
If you installed without regard to this fact, you ended up with BOTH PostgreSQL AND MySQL, and this duplication in most other areas as well.
Please try to do a more minimal install before you scream "bloat".
Not quite. Debian unstable is too fast-paced for my taste. I've run it for a couple years, so I know what I'm talking about. It's mostly solid, but with ocassional glitches which can be very annoying. The problem is that it essentially encourages yous to upgrade everything, even the very basic OS stuff, every few days.
The middle ground I think would be FreeBSD (which I just started running on a new machine). The separation between the base system and the ports really makes sense; the ports are being upgraded constantly, while the base system is on a slower release schedule (but ages faster than Debian stable). Some time ago on the debian-devel list suggested splitting Debian into several independently managed collections to speed things up, which happens to be similar to what FreeBSD has in place.
But still, people should keep an eye on the Debian experimental testing distribution, which aims to be intermediate between stable and unstable. The page doesn't seem to have been updated in a while, though.
Why do people keep saying this? It is indeed currently true for many programs, but it should not be. I am continually amazed by the number of people that just accept "never use x.0 versions, because they're going to be buggy". Software should be tested extensively before a x.0 release, and the new major version number only applied when the program is ready.
</rant>
Now, I've never used Redhat, so I'm not really qualified to comment on it, but I like the way Debian releases. When they put out a new "stable" release, it has gone through extensive public testing. There are still things that fixed subsequently--nobody is ever going to be perfect--but the problems are very few.
--Phil (I'm going to have to install Redhat one of these days, just so I can compare it to Debian.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
What the heck are you talking about? The original links work just fine here.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Not to start a holy war.. But I really admire Debian for holding out and wanting everything perfect in a release, and I admire Redhat's approach of rapid frequency releasing.. But can't we get a middle ground? Either way, it's still fewer bugs that Microsoft Windows!
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Same here. I downloaded the 2 iso's from ibiblio.org, did a clean install of the old Dell workstation at work, and couldn't be happier. I'm actually installing it on an old HP Vectra 486/25NI upgraded with a Pentium OverDrive chip, with 3 NIC's. Why would I do such a thing? Download the latest 2.4.0-test kernel, get the user space iptables code, and go to town.
As for the servers at work, yes, they will not be upgraded to 7.0 for at least a little while. Each .0 release, IMO, has gotten better by a factor of 10.
As for the number of bugs, all I'm concerned about are 1. the showstoppers, and 2. the security bugs. So far, I haven't seen any (doesn't mean they aren't there, but I haven't been bitten by one yet).
It installs kernel 2.2 and X 3.3 normally; 2.4prewhatever is an optional "preview" and X 4 servers get installed if X 3 doesn't support your card.
- Joe
-Joe
M3 T00! It's working fine on several of my computers, with the exception of a AGP problem on my i815 machine (not Redhat's fault - the kernel driver stupidly doesn't function on an 815 when you don't use the on-board video). Rebuilding the kernel fixed that just fine.
:)
I suspect the real reason this story exists is because Rob and co are known Debian bigots, but Slashdot conspiracy theories are so tiresome
Slackware Linux. 6-9 months between releases. Always stable, always high quality. No need for Red Hat's "release bugs" or Debian's "release after the next ice age" extremes. You can have release often and release stable :)
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This article, while tangentially related to Red Hat software, should really be in a category titled something like, "Let's start a flame war". Or are we supposed to think that Cmdr Taco doesn't realize that this will devolve into a Windows vs. Linux or Debian/Slack vs. Corporate Linux religious war before the "First Post" is moderated "offtopic", "flamebait", or "troll" (and really, how hard is it, moderators, to choose one of the above consistently for completely irrelevant posts)?
I do not have a signature
Story reads...
"Today, a newbie, in an experiment gone bad, allowed bugs to escape from bugzilla. They quickly escaped via the internet only to find a new host in RedHat."
Well, doesn't that suck. Sounds like something right out of one of the tabloids. A newbie pulls a bogus figure of his ass and gives it to RedHat.
Yesterday, I was comptemplating ugrading to 7.0 from 6.1 (which has run flawlessly for me). Then, I read some BS about 2500 bugs and instead decided to wait with my upgrade until 7.1. This morning, revised figures are posted by people that understand the process a wee bit more. Those new numbers come in around under 200 bugs.
200 bugs in a release as large as RH 7? Wow. If only most commercial software shipped with as few bugs. Take into consideration that most of these bugs are probably in community written code rather than RedHat written code. These are mostly bugs we've come to live with and are probably being patched as I write this.
What's a shame is that the original story will probably be picked up by MSNBC, CNN or some other news agency and the revised figures will not. Thus, people who may have upgraded or purchaced 7.0 may not do so now. Instead, they may continue to view Linux, in general, as buggy software that can not be trusted. Articles like this only perpetuate this myth.
I only hope that before posting potentially damaging material, that somebody actually check the figures before they are posted to the public. It strikes me as poor journalism, a disservice to the community and utter criminal negligience to do otherwise.
BTW...I'm going to upgrade to 7.0 today.
RD
www.linuxnebie.org and www.bugzilla.redhat.com
Redhat 7 should have never been released. It's a shot at being the first 2.4 distro out (out BEFORE 2.4 itself is ready).
Mistake...
It seems to me this was bottom up made to be a 2.4 system all ready to go. It's shipped before the pacages it relys on are ready.
I understand why RedHat 7 was made this way what I don't understand is why they released it NOW...
If this is a race... then declare RedHat disqualifyed for jumpping the gun...
I don't actually exist.
Grr - so that's why I had to fix two things in the Blackbox source to get it to compile? Oh whell.
Computer 1: It's a Pentium III 550 HP NetServer.
SCSI 2 w/512 megs Ram.
I spent the whole of last night trying to get it installed over the network (didn't work). Would hang in the final process of the installation. I finally waited for the ISO to download and then tried to re-install the system w/the CD.
Everything seemed to work fine. I went through the installation process and when it came time to reboot the machine it FROZE SOLID on the 'Initializing Swap Space' message in init level 1.
I then went through and re-installed it again w/different partition settings , etc . 3 times total when I finally gave up.
I re-installed the machine with RedHat 6.2 and it worked fine. So much for my daring attempt at a x.0 release
...
I have a home machine that I use as a development server and it is a Athlon 750 w/512 megs of ram. Not a SCSI system but a UDMA/66 IDE System.
The machine was able to install correctly, but the interesting thing is durring times of VERY heavy stress to the system.. (Seti@Home or 3D Screen Saver) the machine hard locks. I have been running Mandrake 7.0 on this machine for 4 months and have never had a lockup.
I am guessing that there is a problem somewhere in the kernel that they provided or one of the libraries that they have compiled in that is causing some of these problems.
I have read as well in the kernel mailing list that there is a bit of hoop-da-la about the version of the compiler that RedHat uses.
Now, they are trying to get support in for the 2.4.x kernel as why I am trying to be brave in installing the system as a x.0 release. I believe as it is a bit of a moving target for redhat, there should be a bit of patience and support for them.
I do expect to see a lot of problems and issues as the 2.4 kernel roles out and everyone makes the necesary transitions to make everything run very smooth.
My opinion is simple. If you want rock solid, no bugs.. or at least worked out stable distro's.. don't go with a release that is not only a x.0 release, but a 1 week old release.
Use soemthing that is tried and tested.. such as Debian X (I am not a debian user, but they are a bit slower to release and tend to be more reliable (from what I hear))
The nice thing about RH 7.0 is you can help them out. You can install it yourself (assuming it boots.. (see case 1)) and re-install packages, recompile the kernel.. etc.
It is nice having all the latest and greatest libraries and such installed. It seems that the unfortunatley my RH 6.2 servers are going to be running RH 6.2 much longer than I anticipated based on my initial reaction though. (I will wait for the 7.1 version for any more non-private use..)
Be easy on RH as they do contribute a lot to the comunity. I don't believe that they should be lynched for taking chances on new technologies.
--------------------
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology, in the Jargon File. Of Course were supposed to find and fix bugs, but this is more a 'rate' thing. Its not like anyone designed linux and everything we ship in a distro from the ground up, this software evolved, and is still evolving.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Its hosing link posts, take the extra space out, and the previous link will work.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
I've been running Red Hat 7.0 for a little while. Things I've noticed:
/etc/rc.d/init.d, but have added /etc/init.d as a link for the Solaris users among us.
/etc/fstab: I dislike this. I used to go to /etc/fstab to find the device name of my various partitions. Now it just says "LABEL=/usr" instead of "/dev/hdb6".... This is consistent with the change to fstab where the label name is shown during fsck. I guess I understand the desire to display that information, but dammit, I want my fstab back.
.1 release, the fact that it's a .0 blows me away.
* I expected the first XFree86 4.0 release to be a little wonky, but it works well! Handled both my Permedia and Voodoo3 cards just fine with no user intervention (though, it's annoying that my monitor was not recognized, but it never was under the older X either).
* They've adopted a SysV/Solaris-like set of symlinks for the rc files. I like this. They still use the Red Hat style of
* Disk labels in
* Just the right balance of new vs old software. The kernel is 2.2 (wise, even though 2.4.0-test is pretty darn stable as far as I can tell); I hear gcc is a snapshot release, but I have compiled a whole hell of a lot with it so far; latest GNOME goodies are nice (not quite Helixcode nice)
* No problems yet. I've installed on two systems. One was having problems under both Windows and Linux, and the upgrade did not help, but did not hurt. The other was a test system, where I wanted to play with squid, and all worked just fine.
Things that scare me overall:
* Big distribution for Red Hat
* Semi-graphical LILO ala Corel
* xntp becomes ntp, which breaks a lot of scripts, and it's not on disk1
Looks good for a
Before your next tough decision ask yourself "What would ESR do?"
What would Eric S. Raymond do, if he were here right now?
You can bet he'd write a flame or two, that's what Eric S. Raymond'd do.
When Eric S. Raymond was in the Cathedral, writing proprietary code
He learned how much big business sucks, and wrote the GPL
When Eric S. Raymond was in the Congo, hunting killer apes
He used his magical flaming pen and trashed the KDE
When Eric S. Raymond traveled through time, to the year 3010
He fought and stopped the ghost of Bill Gates
Monopolizing the planet again.
What would Eric S. Raymond do if he were here right now?
You can bet he'd kick an ass or two, that's what Eric S. Raymond'd do.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Someone forgot to insert the leading http:// protocol identifiers for the links in the story, and MSIE 5.5 (here) is generating goofy URLs by inserting http://slashdot.org/ in front of them there links!
Proper URLs:
More like 19 if you count only HIGH or SECURITY. (Posted from a test RH 7.0 Box)
Sure they should be held accountable, if they've truly released a horribly buggy sytem. But it doesn't sound like they have. Alan Cox, in his diary says:
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Just thought I'd pass this along... RH7 won't let us install VMWare on a box so we can get to our dirty MS SQL 7 Server.... because of the 2.4 headers, it can't compile its kernel module.
Argh.... oh well, we found a win box to use instead.
Still love you Red Hat... just a little frustrated right now.
what comes with most scanners.
All generalizations are false
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
In Microsoft Windows 2000, both 5.0 (boxed) and 5.01 (sp1), there is a limit of two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs in a single VDM (virtualized DOS machine). This severely limits the usefulness of DJGPP, as it relies on three nested DPMI programs (GNU make, gcc, cpp/cc1/as/ld) to build programs.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is actually for the reply's to the the parent message:
Using an X.0 release of just about anything for any mission critical, potentially embarassing and market image damaging application is just poor judgement, unless you're an absolute wiz at debugging code on the fly while the clock is ticking and customers are getting upset. There would have to be someing in 7.0 that's not in 6.2 to justify the risk of using unproven code on a production machine. How long did people use Win 3.0? Win95-nonOSR2? Win98-nonSE? NT-noSP's? With that number of bugs there must be lots of neat new stuff, but we never make pretentions of being so bloody good nobody should use anything else. As a professional I'd stick with 6.2 for serious work and test 7.0 in the lab untill enough eyeballs have enough time to scrutinize the code. This IS open source, release early, release often.
1) Cheap
2) Good
3) Fast - choose any two.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
4. The virtualized DOS machine (VDM) allows only two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs (NT 4 and all Win9x systems allow several dozen). The DJGPP environment requires at least three (make, gcc, cc1plus) nested DPMI programs.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ever feel like you're wrestling a rhinocerous by posting comments like this?
I bet if it was Windows you would be all over it.
worse is better.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Yes, Red Hat should have done a better job at clearing out the bugs from the 7.0 distro before they released it but the fact of the matter is is that the open source community thrives on the "Release early, Release often" philosophy. They deserve our ire if they are not able to respond to the bugs and get us a clean 7.1 sometime soon but not for putting together a whole new version of their distro and the bugs that come with that.
As for people who slapped 7.0 on production servers before giving the new version a few weeks to season or be tested, you get what you deserve. Now everyone do your part and beat on your favorite distros releases right after they are released and at very least submit bug reports and at very worse offer a patch. It's the community effort that makes us strong.
If you're a programmer, you'd welcome some of the things they fixed from NT4.
Why am I buying Linux?
Because Linux is good.
Why are you buying Mandrake / SuSE / Debian / whatever? Because Red Hat 7.0 is bad.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Show me your karma first. How am I to know whether you're a true alpha male?
Heh. I'm capped at 50 -- can we talk?
Try 250 and climbing.
.before you post something that include a statistic
Seriously guys, at least check your numbers
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Bullshit. You simply can't release an operating system with just one user-visible bug, no matter how good your quality control is. You just can't test every possible combination of hardware and software out there that might be used.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
...is this one.
Thanks you slashcode for borking the previous link and cutting off 40 bugs.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Red Hat made a real effort to make a distribution that would be ready for the 2.4 kernel when it comes out. That's got to mean a lot of brand-spankin-new packages... devfsd, usb, new glibc & compiler... pretty ambitious... and lots of opportunities for bugs. :)
Touché!
A lot of work went into this release. I was on the beta team for this release, and there were a bunch of people working on a lot of different things to get this as ready as possible. I'm still running one beta version on a laptop and another on my desktop at home, and both are working just fine with everything I do with only two exceptions:
Are there bugs? Yep. Has there ever been a bug free OS release? Nope.
The day you have half the driver support, half the functionality of the API, and anything close to a GUI besides that piece of shit XFree86, then you can talk about a complex OS. Look at QNX. That's a frickin OS. Don't compare your OS to Windows when it's apples to oranges. Another clueless Windows astroturfer. Perhaps the Windows API has a bit more functionality than the Linux API, BUT I DOUBT IT. Perhaps the GUI is a but more polished, but we have a dozen to choose from, or none at all if we don't want one. But when Windows is just finishing off, a Linux distro is just getting warmed up - 30+ programming languages - any type of server capability you can imagine, THE FULL SOURCE CODE, tools for any imaginable task related to computers you might dream of ALL PART OF THE DISTROBUTION. The functionality of something like RedHat 7.0 is immeasurably greater than any version of Windows yet dreamt of. AND THE BUGS GET FIXED unlike those in Windows.
The Open Source movement - if you are to be believed, in its 'infancy' since the 60's - has plenty of both.
Sorry, can't agree with you here. Granted, 250 bugs sound like a lot. But, in a 3+ Gig distro, that is an extrodinarily small number.
Contrary to your analogy regarding the weekly flavor of Windows 98, the frequency of fixes from RedHat come a much slower pace but the response time to a known problem is significantly faster.
While that may sound like a contadiction, the fact remains that RedHat has shown a perpensity to fix problems in their distributions in a timely manner. Unlike Windows updates, these fixes are highly publicized and easy to obtain.
Then, there is the question that if the problems are not in their code but rather in Open Sourced code, do they really have the obligation to fix it or is it merely a courtesy to fix it? Should they be held responsible for fixing every bug in somebody elses code? I would think not.
Knowledgable users should be aware of issues in any program they run. Hell, there are plenty of places to see what problems exists for most programs. Right?
With any software venture, there are always bound to be issues. When you have a commerical product were timelines and profits come into play, products may be released before they are 100% perfect. Perfection has always been the luxury of researchers and hobbiests.
So, I'll stand with RedHat on this one. Where I don't agree with them is on the glibc controversy.
RD
I decided to install it on my laptop, and I was shocked to find out that it requires 1.5GB!! for the install I normally do (SQL, WWW, NFS, SMB, multimedia, etc), while in version 6.2 that same install took 750MB (Still a lot, but with what I'm installing not too bad).
then a guy from redhat replied ...
Enjoy
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Not sure why I'm into rhino wrestling these days, but your description is apt.
This is a detailed article on "the one bug".
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I've gone from Red Hat 6.2 to 6.9.5 to 7.0. I submitted four or five bug reports in 6.9.5; one was a "already fixed in Rawhide" situation, two others got fixes a few days later, one has a fix coming when they put together a glibc-devel errata. XFree86 4.0.1 still consumes an ungodly amount of memory on my machine, but compared to the bugs in the first releases of Red Hat 5.0 and 6.0 (which I avoided until a few weeks of errata issues had gone by), I've been quite impressed. So far I've seen Red Hat 7.0 on 2 computers, and it's been good, 2 for 2. Your particular system may vary, of course. I'd advise waiting a month before upgrading all your corporate workstations, and waiting for 7.1 before touching any important servers... but if you're not in that kind of situation, come on in, the water's fine.
By contrast, I've seen significantly more problems with Mandrake 7.1, which was frighteningly down towards the Windows end of the quality-o-meter. That was a big let down, since Mandrake 7.0 had given our LUG such a smooth installfest last year. At least with Red Hat 5 and 6, the progression from "buggy" to "rock-solid" was steadily upward.
That's because those dirty sneaky nogoodniks down at RedHat are commiting the heretical sin of *gasp* trying to make money. We all know from reading the sacred gospel according to St. Richard and St. Eric that information wants to be FREE, damnit! How DARE they attempt to charge people for their product! Those capitalist pigs and their evil corporation are sell-outs who are betraying the entire blessed Free Software Movement!
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
In many ways, I think that the .0 releases are rather akin to Microsoft's 'public beta' releases (but with fewer bugs than M$'s final releases). There probably wouldn't be much of an issue to make of it if RH wasn't stamping out disks and selling them as a commercial distributions.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I've been using Redhat 7 for a few days now. I haven't had any significant problems. Granted I don't have pretty standard and not very new hardware (K6-2, Millenium II...). Installation was a breeze, even cleaner then 6.2.
.0 release, but also consider that RH decided to include a lot of new stuff too, like Xfree86 4.0, new gcc, etc.
.0 release, but oh well. It works fine on my system tho, so I can't complain too much.
However, there have been a few minor glitches that I wonder about. I tried using LinuxConf to set my static IP address, and it wouldn't find the DNS servers (but incoming traffic was fine). Finally I went back to the old Control Panel and used Network config and it worked fine.
I think bugs are to be expected by now in a
I had high hopes that maybe RH would break the trend and not have a buggy
Still the network configuration problem and a few other oddities definitely are starting to make me consider trying something else, like debian perhaps.
Spyky
Now, lets see: 2,500 reported bugs for a full distro (including many apps) VS 65,000 for the Base OS (most apps $extra)
So, just who's full of "Creepy crawly slimey, icky stickey, ucky yucky BUGS ?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
ESR wisely stated that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I'm sure that many of the people around here have read this, and possibly a disjoint set of people believe it, but I feel it is good to keep harping on that point. As the popularity of linux (any and all distros) increases, the number of reported bugs grows in proportion. This is the theory behind bughunts when groups such as mozilla want people to use their beta software-to find the bugs.
This is open source. Help fix bugs. Stop bitching.
Oh, fuck you. I've had it with your narrow-minded, dystopian, paranoid, self-fulfilling fundamentalism that would humble the son of a preacher and a SS. You're no better than the people you decry. 'FUD'? 'hysteria'? 'Propaganda'? 'better future for our children'? I hope you are trolling, because if not, that was the most pathetic excuse for an opinion I've ever had the displeasure to witness expressed in written words. You make me ashamed of ever writing a line of code. You lack such common sense that you wouldn't recognize it if it came up to you and raped your sorry ass.
Must be tied into that article about drugs and IT... Red Hat's beta testers must've been on some kind bud to miss all these bugs... Asleep at the wheel!
Indeed. While I'll admit, I haven't tried out RH7, I'm familiar with RH6.
A little too familiar.
When I first tried out Linux a few months ago, I'd been told that it was stable and easy to get running. It would install as easily as Windows 95, it would never crash, and I figured with my previous UNIX user experience, it'd be no big deal. I've never been scared by a shell prompt.
I was given a copy of RH6 by a friend. Now, you'll note, I'm a little more savvy than the balding accountant grabbing the impulse-buy at Fry's. I knew 6.0 wouldn't be as stable as the then-current 6.1, but I also didn't have a CD burner at the time, nor did I have high-speed Internet access with which to download RH6.1.
I'm glad it was Red Hat. Its apparent popularity makes it easy to find information and support; it seems every Linux usr knows RH. And since this machine was my first root prompt, it was nice to have friendly and helpful people to help me out through the newsgroups and stuff.
But I can't believe the absolute crap I went through making RH6 work! The worst part of it had to be getting two Allied Telesyn AT-1500 ISA cards to work in the same machine. I did everything that the How-tos told me to do; everything worked great when I tossed a HD with Windows onto the system. Nothing worked under RH6. I finally gave up and got two PCI adapters which worked first shot.
Interestingly enough, when I upgraded that machine to RH6.2, I tossed in my old Allied Telesyns. They worked instantly.
How about having PCMCIA slot services crash your VESA bus 486 desktop (even though the installer specifically asked if you wanted PCMCIA services installed, and you said NO)? How about the damned LILO >1,024 cylinder bug? How about an installer that figures out that you've got a monochrome VGA monitor and accordingly changes the color scheme such that the text and the background are the same color?
I recognize that Red Hat has to please investors. But all the Linux advocacy in the world isn't going to help users, less persistent than I am, who pick up Linux, give it a whirl, and discover that it's as flaky as a Microsoft product. (Remember, a new user knows only "Linux", and probably won't much grasp the concept of the different distributions.)
While I remain satisfied with their product (from the perspective of a relatively new Linux user who still needs spoon-feeding occasionally), Red Hat simply *has* to be more careful.
If 7.0 sucks as badly as Hedwig, they could alienate a lot of people and literally undermine the whole Linux community.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I've been searching the bugzilla database, and there doesn't seem to be 2500 bugs, but 250. Of them, many are closed or duplicate. That make about 100 bugs.
/var/log/message AND /var/log/crond.log). Ie: harmless
Many install bugs, most of them due to *bad* CDs (and not yet closed)
Many minor bugs (kind of log of crond is redirected to
Few missing drivers bugs (eata seems a major one, here)
Few non-distro related bugs (ie: gnome bugs, etc, etc)
Some related to the upgrade of gcc, which now refuses to compile some bad c++ code.
Sure, there are problem, there are people that cannot install, but nothing huge.
Btw, the guy that is linked from the slashdot story appear on several bug reports doing some finger-pointing. Strange, isnt'it ?
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Let me rephrase the original poster's (perfectly reasonable) comment:
Bullshit. You can't release an operating system of that size and scope with only one bug visible "in practice."
Nitpicking sucks. Don't do it.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Software engineering methodology isn't really my forte, but your argument still sounds fishy to me.
When people describe bugs in terms of LOC, they're usually doing post-mortem analysis on the bugs. In other words, they find a problem in a line of code, fix it, add a notch to their count, and move on.
I don't know how they're reporting the bugs for RedHat, but I'd be very surprised if they were using the same methodology. If they were, the implication would be that bugs get fixed way faster than they're likely to in the real world. More likely, the bugs they're counting are those that manifest themselves in tangible ways for users.
In other words, the behavior of a particular tool might be wacky in a given situation, I could count that as being one bug (for the weird condition under which the tool breaks), or as several bugs if the behavior could be traced back to several lines of code.
However, I'm really tired and only speaking from casual experience. Ingest with several grains of NaCl.
Funny how no one said that during the "65,000 bugs in W2K" bullshit spammed around here February. This is not suprising either.
I don't know who pulled the number 2500 out of thin air, but a query of bugzilla as of 9:25pm on 10/02 shows "only" 149 bugs, and given the number of those that are NEW, there are probably less than 100 actual bugs. And of those, how many are RedHat's fault as opposed to buggy packages?
If someone pulled that number out of bugzilla, they must not have known how to use it. If not, then they just pulled the number out of thin air.
I'm not saying that 149 possible bugs is "good", but it is more in line with what you might expect a week after a major release.