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.

Comments

Re:Really?

[Spankophile]

Place yer bets now on the arrival date of 7.1!

<OSS_zealotry>
Why wait for the .1? Fix 'em yourself.
</OSS_zealotry>

Re:Folks, the story is WRONG.

[WzDD]

Not only is the story wrong, it is very damaging. I don't work for Red Hat (and am currently running Debian :-) but seriously. This is just stupid.

• There are 159 (as of recent check) bugs, not 2500, as mentioned above. Considering perhaps 30% are the same ("install failed") and about half the others are *ahem* trivial (such as "Wrong Icon!" and "Workspace strangeness" including the gem "also, the 2x2 are four separate workspaces. I think you want one work space...") this is pretty good.
  
• Even if the number of bugs per distribution stays constant, as Red Hat's userbase expands there will be more bug reports. This means that even if their QA process stays as good as it always was, every release with significant changes will the be "buggiest release ever".
  
• The link in linuxnewbie was due to someone there reacting to an "inflammatory" remark made by a Red Hat developer. The developer was Alan Cox, major kernel hacker and maintainer of the 2.2 kernel series, and he said "if you think it sucks, return it". Now this might strike people as insensitive, until you read the original "bug report". The report says "Redhat 7.0 should be recalled ... this release was a "rush-job"... the QA is terrible." It goes on to say that Red Hat caues nothing but frustration for its users, and ends with a suggestion that this release will cause people to abandon RH for other distros. This isn't even close to a bug report! This is some idiot saying "Redhat sucks," and Alan was right to interpret it that way.
  

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.

Annoyed, But Calm

[Crutcher]

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>

Re:Debian, Redhat.. Middle ground

[PD]

The middle ground is the unstable tree of Debian. All the latest stuff, great package manager, and a small amount of excitement every once in a while.

When the final for Debian came out last month, I had to upgrade exactly one package on my system from the unstable tree.

Re:Debian, Redhat.. Middle ground

[bonzoesc]

Debain can afford to wait for a perfect release. For the most part, it's volunteer, unadvertised (they get copyleft donations from sales of copyleft t-shirts), and free. No money or careers are won or lost in the development of Debian. However, Red Hat, as just another .com, depends on every release to stay open. They're living on the edge just as much as any other dot com company. Debian is at no risk of being dumped by investors - the real Debian investors are those who choose to donate their talent to a 100% free (in all regards) project.

Microsoft investors are as thick-skinned as their users. Their precious good software company can't fail them. It's their hardware causing the daily BSOD.

Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate

I've been doing fine...

[roystgnr]

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.

Re:Debian, Redhat.. Middle ground

[the eric conspiracy]

RedHat comes out with an OS with over 2,000 documented bugs by the public

The actual number on bugzilla is more like 200 (sloppy slashdot journalism again) and most of those are classified as duplicates or nota (Not a Bug). In addition you have to realize that RedHat is FAR more than a Windows release - it includes hundreds of packages utilities applications and so on tha would cost you many thousands of dollars to duplicate (if you could) on a Windows box. This additional functionality on will of course increase the complexity of delivering a bug pree integrartion.

Folks, the story is WRONG.

[Can]

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.