Ask Slashdot: How To Handle Unfixed Linux Accessibility Bugs?

dotancohen (1015143) writes "It is commonly said that open source software is preferable because if you need something changed, you can change it yourself. Well, I am not an Xorg developer and I cannot maintain a separate Xorg fork. Xorg version 1.13.1 introduced a bug which breaks the "Sticky Keys" accessibility option. Thus, handicapped users who rely on the feature cannot use Xorg-based systems with the affected versions and are stuck on older software versions. Though all pre-bug Linux distros are soon scheduled for retirement, there seems to be no fix in sight. Should disabled users stick with outdated, vulnerable, and unsupported Linux distros or should we move to OS-X / Windows?

The prospect of changing my OS, applications, and practices due to such an ostensibly small issue is frightening. Note that we are not discussing 'I don't like change' but rather 'this unintentional change is incompatible with my physical disability.' Thus this is not a case of every change breaks someone's workflow."

Comments

RMS mentions a comparable situation

[Krishnoid]

From The Law of Success 2.0:

RMS: So if I'm using the free program and I make a change in it, which I know how to do, then I could publish my modified version and then you. Perhaps you're not a programmer; you would still be able to get the benefit of the change I make. Not only that, you could pay somebody to change the program for you, or you could join an organisation whose goal is to change a certain program in a certain way, and all the members would put in their money, and that's how they would hire a programmer to change it.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

There's one major problem there: most disabled people in the US are living on Supplemental Security Income of $600-850/month, and have no other source of money. Even a group of them are unlikely to be able to pool enough to hire somebody to fix a bug in something like Xorg.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[Charliemopps]

The open source community is pretty cool. Simply getting together in the right forum would likely get the right people interested in helping you. Hell I'd start with posting to Slashdot... hey... WAIT A MINUTE WE'VE BEEN HAD!!!

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[Anonymous Coward]

There's one major problem there: most disabled people in the US are living on Supplemental Security Income of $600-850/month, and have no other source of money. Even a group of them are unlikely to be able to pool enough to hire somebody to fix a bug in something like Xorg.

dotancohen (1015143) could approach a charity which works with disabled people and ask whether they would underwrite the cost of hiring a programmer to patch the latest version of X.org to restore the "sticky key" feature.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[VortexCortex]

It's like charities don't exist. It's like kickstarter never happened. I feel sorry for the dystopian timeline you left when you joined ours.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[Anonymous Coward]

There's one major problem there: most disabled people in the US are living on Supplemental Security Income of $600-850/month

That's demeaning bullshit. Many people with disabilities are simply old and retired. Many others work for a living.

Even a group of them are unlikely to be able to pool enough to hire somebody to fix a bug in something like Xorg.

If someone lives on SSI and doesn't have a job but uses Linux, they have something that's very valuable to FOSS: time and the ability to contribute. They can either learn how to program and fix this kind of bug, or they can start getting involved in FOSS in other ways (e.g., writing documentation) and influence the directions that projects take.

Contrary to your arrogant views, people with disabilities aren't helpless outcasts that are dependent on other people's handouts.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[JustOK]

IF they have a disability that requires them to use sticky keys AND if sticky keys don't work THEN exactly how do you expect them to code the fix?

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[wvmarle]

The sad part is that it is a known bug, that got introduced breaking a perfectly working feature, and is still not fixed. It is not a new feature they're asking for, just to retain something that was always there.

This is programmers not doing their job - and it being FOSS that is distributed for free is irrelevant as it's more than a hobby-level tool we're talking about. It's production-level software, and essential to the operation of a large number of computer systems.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[Anonymous Coward]

If the software is "essential" for production environments, then those running production environments dependent on that software should have support agreements in place to manage the risk of such events occurring.

You either have in-house staff to solve problems, or you transfer the liability of those problems to a third party by means of a contract (the support agreement). That's how professional production environments are run.

Professional production environments do not rely on random internet people working for free to give them a reasonable turnaround. Running truly production critical software without any formal, contractually agreed upon means of support is nothing short of negligence on the part of the administrators.

Take care of your own backyard. You want production support? Pay for it. Programmers don't owe you a fix for anything - regardless of how important it is to you - unless you have an agreement.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[sumdumass]

Use the old outdated software.

Of course this shouldn't even be an issue. You would think accesibility features would be a priority within the community or some segment of it.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[WaywardGeek]

Kudos to RMS for believing accessibility is a human right, and taking action personally to promote accessibility in Linux. Fixing accessibility in Linux is a mess, but if we can get enough people involved, it's doable. This is the mission of multiple efforts, and the one I'm involved in is the ACF (Accessible Computing Foundation). The free software movement, and the goal of people with disabilities taking control of their computing environments are well aligned. GNU/Linux provides a platform where at least in theory any and all accessibility issues can be corrected, unlike Windows and Mac OS X.

Unfortunately there are considerable obstacles to "fixing" accessibility in Linux. I believe they can be overcome if enough people come together to make it happen, but there are huge challenges. There are also people who devote a lot of their lives to improving the situation, often for free or very low financial incentive. I spearheaded the 3.0 release of Vinux, which is Linux for the Vision Impaired. I fixed a dozen or so accessibility bugs, but the right fix in many cases would involve major changes to GNU/Linux. I'll list a few.

The accessibility API in GNU/Linux, atk/at-spi, should have shared more functionality with Windows. For typical corporate and FOSS anti-Windows reasons, the accessibility stack was built intentionally in a Windows incompatible way. The result is that accessibility in Firefox and many other major applications never works as well in Linux as it does in Windows. It simply is not reasonable to make every software vendor do all their accessibility coding N times for N operating systems. There is even an effort called Iaccessible2, which is basically a FOSS accessibility stack for Windows, which the creators seemed to hope could also work for Linux. The code was even donated to the Linux Foundation. However, there was never any money or motivation in FOSS land to actually port the software to Linux, SFAIK. Building a single accessibility API that works in Windows, GNU/Linux, Android, and Mac OS X would go a long way towards fixing accessibility in all of those places, but especially in GNU/Linux, since it is usually the OS vendors put the least effort into. As it stands, few GNU/Linux distros are able to keep FireFox and LibreOffice accessibility working.

Then there's the problem of Linux being a multi-headed Hydra monster with no one in charge. At Microsoft, Bill Gates took a personal interest in accessibility, and that's all it took for the entire company to take accessibility seriously. In GNU/Linux land, RMS also takes a strong personal interest in accessibility, but it's not like most of the devs work for the guy. RMS can make his case, but when your boss is asking for prettier GTK+ widgets in Gnome 3 and you're late delivering, accessibility fixes fall by the wayside. When we are lucky enough for a patch to be developed, many times the GNU/Linux authors refuse to include them, because the "fix" is not perfect. For example, I added accessible descriptions to pixmaps in GTK+, which enabled blind users to hear 'star' for a star icon in a table containing pixmaps. The devs could not decide if pixmap was the right place for this accessible description, enabling them to justify doing nothing, and the continued lack of support for accessible icons was the result. It saved them a few hours of work in testing, which was their real priority. Multiply this asinine situation 100X, and you begin to understand why making Linux accessible is hard. GNU/Linux land seems to take pride in making it hard to fix accessibility, because we make it almost impossible to override any given stupid author's decision not to support accessibility. I should be able to patch GTK+, and have that patch automatically distributed to every user of every distro who believes my accessibility patches are something they want. Instead, we've built a system where patches have to be accepted by the authors, and then distributed slowly over years to the stable distros. Stupid, stupid, stupid...

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[WaywardGeek]

There's one major problem there: most disabled people in the US are living on Supplemental Security Income of $600-850/month, and have no other source of money. Even a group of them are unlikely to be able to pool enough to hire somebody to fix a bug in something like Xorg.

This is also potentially a huge benefit. I really enjoy working to make GNU/Linux more accessible. I'd do it full time if I could, but I cant afford to. I don't have the time, and companies wont pay me to do it.

People with disabilities, as you suggest, often have no job and little money. They often have lot's of free time that could be spend improving FOSS accessibility. A primary vision of the Accessible Computing Foundation is creating a world where people with disabilities help themselves by creating all of he accessible software they need. There are far more than enough brilliant blind people around the world than would be needed to make Linux virtually 100% accessible to the blind. They just need to come together, learn to code, and make it happen. One of the primary messages for young blind kids is that this is even possible. We seem to live in a world where people with disabilities are encouraged to settle for less than what they can achieve. How cool would it be to organize this unemployed force to make the changes they need? How cool would it be to get young blind kids across the country learning to write code?

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[Lehk228]

You know how desktops still contain that crappy internal speaker, and the computer beeps once when its starting normally? Thats because the ADA demands this audio feedback.

[citation needed]

Re: RMS mentions a comparable situation

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI.

The speaker has nothing to do with ADA laws. That's bullshit.

The reason PCs have speakers is because it lets the operator know everything is working correctly and helps them troubleshoot boot errors that can happen which prevent the display from working. The speaker will create different beep patters depending on the BIOS error codes. Look it up.

Memory failure is a sequence of beeps.

Motherboard failure? A diff sequence of beeps or perhaps no beeps.

Keyboard failure?

Display failure?

All diff beep tones because there may not be a display available in such a low level error condition.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[cciechad]

Your free to distribute your patches separately or fork the project if you don't like the way its going. My distro Gentoo does this all the time when there are patches that upstream doesn't want to accept. It could also be your fault I can see developers not wanting to accept patches that aren't coded well or don't follow thier vision for the architecture. So since you can fork or distribute patches what are you complaining about?

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[The Snowman]

You would think accesibility features would be a priority within the community or some segment of it.

I would think whoever checked in the change that broke the software should have known when the automated test cases failed, and that person should be held responsible. At my last job, the person that broke an automated test and could not prove the tests ran successfully locally (i.e. build server might be different than a development machine in some way that breaks a test, should not happen but it does sometimes) was obligated to bring donuts the next day.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[hairyfeet]

And read the multitude of posters below you, what do they say? "Its free so you can't complain" which just goes to show that even many in the community realize its strictly hobbyist level code and that you get what you pay for, a big nothing.

Meanwhile if they would have went Apple or Windows they would have years of support, a strict timeline so they'd know exactly when the OS would no longer be supported, and with sticky keys and other tools for the disabled being fully functional the entire time.

The simple fact that its stayed broken THIS LONG and that people here honestly think paying extortion so some dipshit programmer will get off his lazy fucking ass and FIX WHAT HE BROKE just shows how honestly piss poor and how little oversight there is in the FOSS community. If the shop I worked at previous fucked over the users that badly their asses would be fired. In the FOSSie community fucking shit up is a moneymaking opportunity for the shitty programmer...nice job guys.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[WaywardGeek]

So, if I maintain a set of say 20-ish critical accessiblity patches in everything from GTK+ to FireFox, in a git repo, would you pull them when you build Gentoo? An OS compiled from source should make this simpler, though the testing goes out the window.

Re:RMS mentions a comparable situation

[cciechad]

Yes exactly you could setup an accessibility overlay to patch the packages or pull from an alternate SVN. If enough dev's were interested you could probably setup an accessibility specific profile.

Re: RMS mentions a comparable situation

[astar]

A use able box and a ssh link to target? Maybe switch to something besides Linux like one of the bsd or a derivative like OSX. Try a high end cell? Play nice with Theo and crew who get really offended about bugs. You might be able to do a good bug report and have a fix the next day and after testing it would be pushed upstream. Then you might be able to use the next Linux release. Of course the fix would require you to apply the fix.

go Windows

[turkeydance]

familiarity with being handicapped.

Re:go Windows

[sumdumass]

With two distant cousins with disabilities, i have noticed that they primarily use Macs and most of the usable software works on that platform.

Well, things may have changed a bit since i last worked with their computers. It was circa 2000-2005 or so. I helped one of their schools refurbish a bunch of system 9 ( I 5 i think) systems for their students. They ran a chatrity drive whrn OS X came about giving a huge tax deduction reciept for people upgrading to the OSX on intel hardware.

It's been bisected and confirmed

[spitzak]

Somebody has already narrowed the problem down to specific patch:

Comment 7 Peter Hutterer 2014-01-16 05:43:43 UTC

bisected to this commit:

commit 11319a922575f1da1d3c5774728c0dee12bab069
Author: Peter Hutterer
Date: Thu Oct 11 16:03:33 2012 +1000

        xkb: ProcesssPointerEvent must work on the VCP if it gets the VCP

It would help if that number was a link to the git log.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[Zombie Ryushu]

Could you create a downstream diff at the distribution level to resolve the bug?

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[Anonymous Coward]

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=11319a922575f1da1d3c5774728c0dee12bab069

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[spitzak]

Goddamn that was painful, but I found the actual patch:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xo...

I would say it is rather shocking that this Peter Hutterer actually did about 90% of the work, then posted something that is not a clue as to how to see the answer.

And that the original poster (who I assume made this Slashdot story) did not post any followup for 3 months, probably leading Peter to forget all about fixing this.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[spitzak]

I'll bet this is going to be patched in the git repositor within a half hour.

But I'm not sure if posting Slashdot stories is the best way to get a bug fixed. But if it is the only one that works, might as well do it.

I still feel the original poster should have put *something* on that bug report in all the time since January 16th!

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[dasunt]

If that patch didn't exist, I'd recommend finding the mailing list or forum, then asking them. Else, check the package maintainer for your distribution, and email them directly.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[Anonymous Coward]

Spitzak your "not post any follow up for 3 months" statement seems to easy to disprove.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73155

Dotan Cohen 2013-12-30 14:46:05 UTC - Original post
Dotan Cohen 2013-12-30 18:46:10 UTC - response same day
Dotan Cohen 2014-01-10 13:25:23 UTC - initial response to Peter Hutterer
Dotan Cohen 2014-02-14 10:20:39 UTC - second response to Peter Hutterer (includes a thank you)
Dotan Cohen 2014-03-21 12:35:54 UTC - inquiry on possible schedule to fix

Slashdot post
Dotan Cohen 2014-03-28 21:34 - public request for assistance

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[phantomfive]

Peter Hutterer is one of the geniuses of project management who decided it would be better to make things in Wayland. So look at this as a preview for how things will be going in Wayland.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'll bet this is going to be patched in the git repositor within a half hour.

Reverting would be easy - I'm don't know enough about X to understand if the IsMaster(mouse) test can easily be augmented to not break StickyKeys, but fixing a null pointer dereference is something that needs to be done.

But for just the users' use case (and people will hate this) - this is where paying somebody to deal with the problem for you comes in.

A decent hacker would have done the work you did in the first hour, created a distro patch in the second, and put up a repo with the new packages in the third. Throw in an hour for testing.

It seems likely that there are enough people affected by this that if they all threw in a dollar it would have been done by the next day. What we might have here is a community coordination problem, not just a software bug.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[H0p313ss]

fixing a null pointer dereference is something that needs to be done.

FFS... that's the issue?

Screw hiring developers, let's start a kickstarter and hire someone to break the kneecaps of whoever committed the broken code.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[VortexCortex]

It seems likely that there are enough people affected by this that if they all threw in a dollar it would have been done by the next day. What we might have here is a community coordination problem, not just a software bug.

Or, you know, just giving a head's up to the dev who was already bisecting the bug and what not. That the bug was left for months without follow-up from "affects me too on $OS $VERSION" is the problem. Instead of being so hyperbolic and moronic as to resorting to paying people and bitiching about it on a tech news site and saying, OH, SHOULD I JUST SWITCH TO $PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE like some kind of moron or shill, the affected party could have opened a new (duplicate) bug, but seeing as they already knew about the bug, it makes one wonder why the anti-FLOSS sentiment when they rejected the FLOSS model of fixing shit even having known about said model's existence as demonstrated by TFS.

I think the answer is more approachable issue trackers, so that laymen can more easily find bugs. They're a bit too unruly for joke six-pack to interact with directly, and may cause him to bitch loudly to his peers in frustration. Why, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but were I aware of what appears to be a glaring disregard for a disabled community and harbored any degree of malice towards FLOSS operating systems, I think that submitting vitriolic bullshit on popular tech-news sites and promoting proprietary software while doing so would be exactly the MO for my political propaganda.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubtful, as the "bug" is actually following the spec.
XKB Protocol Specification, Section 4.4 on page 9: Modifiers are automatically unlatched when the user presses a non-modifier key.
A mouse click is a pointer event, not a key.
Ergo, mouse clicks don't unlatch modifier keys. which is the current behavior.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[cyborg_zx]

It works on so many levels.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[Antique Geekmeister]

Sir or madam, I am impressed at your swift pursuit and analysis of this issue. I wish far, far more engineers would actually _find_ the problem, rather than discuss the political implications. If you're involved in any major software or hardware projects, I would be delighted to see if my colleagues or I would have uses for them. And I hope your current workplace realizes the kind of engineer they have on their hands and are paying you enough.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[dbIII]

It appears that someone was looking for a problem to complain about and then found this one.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[dbIII]

Hang on - all the fanboys are busy telling me Wayland is already finished and ten times better than X :)
Thankfully there are other people like Daniel Stone involved that have a track record so Wayland may be perfect for it's aims (eg. a nice phone screen and a good desktop framebuffer for apps to paint on) even if it never comes up to the deranged dreams of the very loud fanboys.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[HuguesT]

Bill Spitzak is a well-known developer, particularly in the film industry. Among other things he created FLTK. Here's to you, Bill.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[brantondaveperson]

Throw in an hour for testing.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is the problem. An hour for testing, and its good, right?

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[spitzak]

Sorry, a mouse button is a key for anybody in the real world. It even has it's own keysym values in X.

Also as pointed out, OS/X and Windows, and earlier verisons of X, worked this way. If this is really somebody saying "mouse buttons are not keys and I will obey the text literally" then that is really sad.

From the patch description this sounds like an accidental change, not deliberate. But beyond that it is hard to figure out what needs to be fixed. It sounds like there is a null pointer dereference, but only when the X server is shutting down. That's pretty minor and in fact something I know commercial software would ignore.

Re:It's been bisected and confirmed

[Blaskowicz]

Does Wayland run fast on software rendering, 2D output in VESA mode, on a single core slow CPU?

I now believe Wayland will be great afterall, but you don't always have OpenGL hardware, or drivers, or good enough of both.

Mmm

[Anrego]

I'll give you that this bug carries a tad more weight due to what I would think is a large impact, but the usual "no one is fixing this bug" answers apply:

- do it yourself (I get that this is often not an option, but including for completeness)
- convince someone else to do it
- pay someone to do it
- find some workaround

Re:Mmm

[roc97007]

I'll give you that this bug carries a tad more weight due to what I would think is a large impact, but the usual "no one is fixing this bug" answers apply:

- do it yourself (I get that this is often not an option, but including for completeness)
- convince someone else to do it
- pay someone to do it
- find some workaround

I think OP is trying to do the second one with this article. Perhaps someone will read this and be embarrassed enough to fix it.

Re:Mmm

[Sigma 7]

do it yourself (I get that this is often not an option, but including for completeness)

Sometimes it isn't an option because your fix gets rejected (or left to idle in an obscure bug report)

For example, one build utility had a bug where it checked for the presense of a compiler, but not if it was functional. The fix was rejected because the build utility doesn't check path - despite the fact that it does so for a different compiler. (Explicitly defining which compiler to use defeats the purpose of using said tool in the first place - I'd just use Makefile instead.)

Did you know it took 10+ years for Mozilla to fix the alert() denial loop? That bug is older than Mozilla itself, and the most obvious fix of "checkbox to stop further dialogs" was dismissed as a hack (compared to the destructive hack of force-killing Mozilla.)

Re:Mmm

[VortexCortex]

Well, sometimes even if you get the patch accepted it STILL doesn't fix the issue.

For example, I once submitted a patch and had it accepted to a project, but the maintainer had died before releasing a new build. This was severely inconsiderate because I really needed this bug to be fixed. What other extreme "+1 Interesting" edge cases can you think of for why all of the normal options just couldn't work? What possible hope can we have of a fix when a cosmic ray could change a bit of the release binary and actually re-introduce the very same bug while the code remains perfectly patched?

Here's how it gets fixed. When everyone migrates to the buggy version, thousands of affected users suddenly cry out, and then are quickly silenced by a working patch and update.

Protip: The graph speaks of its trends, not its outliers.

Re:Mmm

[JimSadler]

I would suspect that most disability types have members that can adapt software to the needs of the group. Perhaps someone that has a disability can contact the org that represents their disability and suggest that the patch be mentioned in the org's fliers or on their web site. Better yet some of these orgs could actually send a patched DVD with to members of the group that need the software.

Re:Mmm

[VortexCortex]

Did you know it took 10+ years for Mozilla to fix the alert() denial loop [mozilla.org]? That bug is older than Mozilla itself, and the most obvious fix of "checkbox to stop further dialogs" was dismissed as a hack (compared to the destructive hack of force-killing Mozilla.)

Yeah, and it should be reverted to the prior behavior because it doesn't fix the issue. If you're giving someone an infinite alert loop, then your code is bad or malicious.

Whether it is bad or malicious this "fix" doesn't fix the issue at all. The very same "denial of service" is easily produced by wrapping an infinite loop in a short window.setInterval(...);. Then instead of an alert() popup you get a never-ending stream of "would you like to stop the script?" dialogs. So, if it's a pop-up dialog denial of service attack you're fixing, then that fucking moronic patch, didn't do jack shit, dingus.

Protip: Application Level Modal Dialogs are the problem -- That they prohibit you from using your browser functions, like the refresh button or address bar, and not just the page itself is the issue.

A "modal dialog" is a DENIAL OF SERVICE to all other application features. The fix should really happen at the OS UI level. Just fire all the UI designers who think modality is grand.

Re:Mmm

[tlambert]

I think OP is trying to do the second one [...convince someone else to do it...] with this article. Perhaps someone will read this and be embarrassed enough to fix it.

Or perhaps it will backfire to discourage other people from posting future embarrassing articles every time someone has a problem where they consider a change a bug, and want the behaviour reverted?

Re:Mmm

[Antique Geekmeister]

> What other extreme "+1 Interesting" edge cases can you think of for why all of the normal options just couldn't work?

Source code, or source code used to compile working version, is gone. That means a complete rebuild _of the source tree_, and with older projects a complete rebuild of the toolchain used to compile the source. This is often very, very expensive, but vital for software upgrades to run on modern operating systems.

Re:Mmm

[Sigma 7]

Yeah, and it should be reverted to the prior behavior because it doesn't fix the issue.

Prior behavior was with Windows 95/98 and really old versions of Netscape, where the browser blindly loaded an image from c:\con\con because that's the file found in the img tag. Unlike the BSoD, you needed a 110 reset.

And no, you should never revert to a revision that provides worse control over malicious scripts.

you get a never-ending stream of "would you like to stop the script?" dialogs

The script-stopping dialog would kill all scripts on that page, not just the individual one. Stopping the script includes stopping all timers produced by the script.

A "modal dialog" is a DENIAL OF SERVICE to all other application features.

Correct, and as the other anonymous poster said, an application is free to freeze itself to show that modal dialog.

What isn't acceptable is sandboxed or semi-sandboxed code running under that application capable of freezing the parent, and blocking everything else running. It is the duty of any application capable of running arbitrary code to allow the user to instantly block anything malicious or faulty, with minimal impact to things that should remain running.

Re:Mmm

[Briareos]

Did you know it took 10+ years for Mozilla to fix the alert() denial loop [mozilla.org]? That bug is older than Mozilla itself, and the most obvious fix of "checkbox to stop further dialogs" was dismissed as a hack (compared to the destructive hack of force-killing Mozilla.)

Yeah, and it should be reverted to the prior behavior because it doesn't fix the issue.

Last I checked alert()s were tab-modal in Firefox, so where's the problem?

If you're giving someone an infinite alert loop, then your code is bad or malicious.

Whether it is bad or malicious this "fix" doesn't fix the issue at all. The very same "denial of service" is easily produced by wrapping an infinite loop in a short window.setInterval(...);. Then instead of an alert() popup you get a never-ending stream of "would you like to stop the script?" dialogs. So, if it's a pop-up dialog denial of service attack you're fixing, then that fucking moronic patch, didn't do jack shit, dingus.

That's why the "would you like to stop the script" dialog kills any and all JavaScript running in that tab, INCLUDING your setInterval...

Protip: Application Level Modal Dialogs are the problem -- That they prohibit you from using your browser functions, like the refresh button or address bar, and not just the page itself is the issue.

A "modal dialog" is a DENIAL OF SERVICE to all other application features. The fix should really happen at the OS UI level. Just fire all the UI designers who think modality is grand.

Protip: check to see if the dialog you're moaning about is even still modal before moaning about it. (Hint: it isn't)

As someone who is Handicapped

[Zombie Ryushu]

I support fixing this bug, Linux has far too many issues with this.

Re:As someone who is Handicapped

[roc97007]

I agree. Last I heard, we *wanted* people to use Linux on the desktop.

Re:As someone who is Handicapped

[H0p313ss]

I agree. Last I heard, we *wanted* people to use Linux on the desktop.

That's just a rumor that the Gnome guys would take issue with.

Switch to wayland

[Anonymous Coward]

They might not have implemented that bug yet.

Re:Switch to wayland

[unixisc]

I was going to ask - wouldn't Wayland neatly sidestep that bug? How about Mir?

Re:Switch to wayland

[dbIII]

Ask them when they get as far as implementing it or whether they've already decided that it's going to be left as a problem to be dealt with in each application (which may mean qt, e17 or gtk taking up the slack instead of each individual developer having to worry about it - so possibly not a big deal).
They have a mailing list.

Re:What did you expect?

[roc97007]

I think it's reasonable to believe that an Accessibility feature continue to work. And I think it's in the best interests of the Linux community for that to happen.

Re:nothing is broken

[roc97007]

I suspect that we are hearing a little bit of frustration. And surely this is a low hanging fruit -- a lot of positive karma could be had for what sounds like a reasonable amount of programming.

What the hell is wrong with some people?

[I'm New Around Here]

So far 13 posts, and most of them are unhelpful drivel.

Way to prove Linux is superior.

Did he mention the system used to work as expected, and now is broken?

If I was a Linux advocate, I'd be ashamed of the community over stupid crap like this situation.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[Zombie Ryushu]

I am incapable of fixing it. (and I have a Bachelors degree of IT/CS) and I'll assume the person posting can't fix it. An upstanding member of the community NEEDS to fix this. I am ashamed over this.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding, eh?

Not the only instance. Here's one from ages ago, identified initially as an accessibility issue:

https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-24304

even prodvided test case to demonstrate it. Finally gets a response ~ 1 1/2 *years* later:

"... Believe it or not, we have other priorities (this is actually not the only open bug!) and some of them even support our jobs so that we can continue working on Qt. ..."

This kind of lack of interest in accessibility is why we don't use any Linux on the desktop. Macs & Windows make it a priority.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[I'm New Around Here]

Hi Zombie. Your posts were in the group that wasn't "unhelpful drivel". Sorry if you thought I was attacking you.

My share of outrage grew as I was reading the initial responses, quoting Stallman and saying 'go fix it yourself'. I refreshed the screen before posting, to get an accurate count, and saw your responses then.

I thought about specifying the ones that were or weren't drivel, but decided it would dilute the message, and after 30 more minutes, no one would know which were in those initial groups.

Anyhow, I also have no way to help the situation directly, but hope my geek shaming has a beneficial effect overall.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[symbolset]

Has it occurred to you that not all Slashdot posters are Linux fans? Some of them are a little butthurt about all the Windows bashing.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[QuietLagoon]

Bingo.

So far 13 posts, and most of them are unhelpful drivel. Way to prove Linux is superior.

This thread shows a lot of what is wrong in the Linux community.

.
A significant bug appears, and little is posted besides drivel.

Way to go Linux Community.

Just fix the damn bug.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[westlake]

So far 13 posts, and most of them are unhelpful drivel.

The worst being the posts that suggest the disabled should cough up the money to pay for a fix or fix the problem themselves. It would be rough justice to put these posters on an SSI budget and see how well they fare.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[I'm New Around Here]

That aspect did occur to me. But the few who seemed genuinely sincere in support of Linux were not any more helpful than the ones who were simply trolling. Only zombie and roc were supportive in a meaningful way. And when I initally saw the article, there were only 8 messages. It went up to 13 when I refreshed the display for more accuracy. Spitzak finally linked to the patch and showed that it was being committed to git, but his initial post, which I saw as I was typing my own post, only showed that there was a bug report. We knew there was a bug report; that's what the story is about.

So, all that fueled my feeling of disgust in the Linux community, and led to my post.

Anyway, thanks for the honest response/challenge. It's good to keep people's feet to the fire.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[I'm New Around Here]

Exactly.

It's not like we are outraged that something in Linux doesn't work quite right. Or that something has never worked quite right. And it certainly isn't something that a 'special interest group' wants added. It was a previously-working feature that was broken for some reason. The /.er that wrote the original story was very candid and reserved, considering the personal nature of what he was addressing.

And the response were "well, that's free software for you", "fix it yourself" "the rms says blahblahblah", and "derp".

We know the first two or three posts are going to be trolls, generally, but every single response was either crap or simply unhelpful overall. If we have to specifically bring geek-shaming into the discussion, I'll do it. It's not like my karma matters when rent is due.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[epyT-R]

Still better than the "we pretend to care about our customers, but really care about protecting our image from damage by legitimate complaints" non-committal corporate newspeak that most closed vendors respond with.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[rk]

If it makes you feel any better, my first reaction on seeing this was "Hmm, let me read the comments and see if anyone has a fix or workaround, and if not, hell, I'm sitting around in hospital bored out of my mind. I'm not familiar with the Xorg code tree, but this would be a great thing to spend a weekend to get my feet wet." I'd like to think that there were at least a few of us out here in the same place (well, maybe not the hospital part ;-)), leaving chuckleheads to post before the people who rolled up their shirtsleeves could say anything. In 2014 I don't consider /. to be quite the locus is used to be for open source developers it once was, but there's still a bunch here.

Glad to see there is a fix that might work already.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[I'm New Around Here]

You make a good point or two. But if you think a little talk is going to make me feel better, ... just kidding. It helps quell the rage. ;^)

Hope your hospital stay goes well.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is slashdot isn't a bug tracker, and more importantly this issue goes way beyond this one bug. This story will probably result in a fix, but this is a common thing, and discussion about it in a broader sense seems fair and more in-line with what slashdot is about.

You get this kind of situation where you have a bug that impacts a relatively small number of users but does so in a particularly disruptive way. The bug sits there until either someone raises enough of a stink about it, someone puts up some cash, or someone who is impacted _and_ has the ability to fix it does so, or occasionally the bug actually does get get fixed by normal process.

It's not like developers are doing this maliciously. There's just a lot of bugs, and prioritizing them is not really a trivial thing.

I get that people don't like hearing this answer, it's unfair, and it's easy to point out that this sucks, but what is the solution? Hint: "everyone should fix all the bugs" isn't gonna work.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[jrumney]

Did he mention the system used to work as expected, and now is broken?

Are you sure it was working as expected before? The current behaviour seems quite convenient, and quite possibly could have been the original intention of the feature, especially since the fix that has changed the behaviour seems to be the correct fix for other problems involving distinction between mouse and keyboard events. A lot of fuss is being made about the fact that the bug reporter needs to press Ctrl a second time to cancel his previous control for a mouse operation - if that is, he is not going to immediately press a control key (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X being the most likely operations after a multiple object mouse selection). Apparently this makes sticky keys unusable for him and will cause him to switch OS. Good riddance I say. Impatient, grandstanding users are a huge demotivator for open source developers.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[Anrego]

The easy and classic way of prioritizing bugs is to count the number of people complaining.

You can throw a severity field in there, but it's always subjective and 10,000 users complaining about a "medium severity" bug is probably going to rise above 2 or 3 complaining about a "ultra high my life is over total showstopper" bug.

This model mostly works but of course falls apart when you've got the high impact to low user count bugs.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[Livius]

The problem illustrates technology egos gone mad.

Of course they know 99% of even technical people simply cannot fix software of this complexity. They are waiting for everyone else to point out how inadequate ordinary people or even ordinary software developers are compared to masters such as themselves, because they would rather listen to that than follow through with whatever commitment they made.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[reikae]

How does your post help the submitter? Your post and now mine aren't any more helpful than those you call unhelpful drivel.

I use both Windows and Debian GNU/Linux. Both work fine for me. There are nice and not-so-nice people in both Windows and Linux communities. The niceness of the community doesn't have anything to do with technical superiority or inferiority of the operating systems (or kernels if you will).

Re: What the hell is wrong with some people?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this shit, "Linux pisses on the disabled peoples" is the new "think of the children" method from Redmond? Use disabled people as a leverage for antipathy?

It would be approximately a whole days work with coffee breaks to add a config option and logic that enables the old functionality upon request.

Why anyone hasn't done it because the community does not as a whole owe you anything and will not zerg rush to fix Your Bug. The community people perhaps have other things to consider. If you ask someone nicely they might help you out, like I said its not a big thing. The OP did ask nicely and it didn't get far, but all the information was given how to fix this. Next, get more devs to see this. Reddit might be a good place. Slashdot perhaps isn't anymore, it used to be though...

My question is how many people are impacted by this? I don't mean the collateral whining, I mean real actual disabled person(s?) who cannot use the software now properly because of this bug?

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[blackest_k]

Most posts on Slashdot are unhelpful drivel, although some are golden.
How do comments made on slashdot relate to Linux?

Did he mention the system used to work as expected, and now is broken?

I read your comment why wouldn't I have read the summary? but yes it is at the top of the page if you use your page up button you can check for yourself. do you have a UI that allows you to do that? You might consider my reply insulting but look at what you wrote.

If I was a Linux advocate, I'd be ashamed of the community over stupid crap like this situation.

which community? which situation? That a Slashdot story has a lot of crappy comments? That you post flamebait and it gets modded insightful? As a member of the same species as yourself its a sad situation to see posts like yours and the story was overstated. A feature of sticky keys was broken.

from latter posts it appears there is a patch for it, but it appears that it has to be approved and tested by one guy who is overworked, thats not a good situation but perhaps someone who has the knowledge and ability to work on X might step up to help out.

   

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[jones_supa]

So far 13 posts, and most of them are unhelpful drivel.

Way to prove Linux is superior.

That is because we are starting to prove that Linux isn't superior anymore!

These days the quality assurance of the Linux ecosystem is terrible and things break all the time. Meanwhile, the security and performance of Windows has increased tremendously since the introduction of the NT 6.x base.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[dbIII]

The vast expanse of malware out there argues differently :(
Don't get me wrong, I actually like Win7 and really do hope that MS gets their shit together to deal with security and performance. If they would focus on that more than "look and feel" and marketing (which is an utter waste since they own the market) they may start to make a dent in their malware problem.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[jones_supa]

It is essentially 100% secure if you do not install spurious software and keep the OS and browser relatively up-to-date.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[dbIII]

Please discuss these things seriously instead of expressing wishes.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[jones_supa]

Aahh, I really must stop drinking this Microsoft kool-aid.

Re:What the hell is wrong with some people?

[symbolset]

Your comment would be more successful if it didn't disprove its own point, AC.

Use older version..

[Blaskowicz]

Some distros are supported for a long time, like CentOS, Ubuntu LTS and others (I dont' know them) and debian is half-decent with three years.
So it's easy to install a distro based on Ubuntu 12.04, you get support till 2017 so that buys you time till the bug is fixed! (or even some Wayland and graphics driver that work well enough, if the accessibility feature is implemented)

Debian wheezy uses Xorg 1.12.4 (I've just checked) and works till 2016, it has many derivates too (like Crunchbang)
I don't know too much about the rpm world, if not for CentOS, it is dated but has very long support. till 2020.

Re:Use older version..

[Blaskowicz]

There are some solutions to that problem. CentOS backports features into older kernels, Ubuntu has the LTS enablement stack, which is included in installation media as Ubuntu 12.04.2, 12.04.3, 12.04.4 etc. In this case though, the Xorg server is updated which is what we wanted to avoid.

Older gens of hardware parts can still be bought new, like a Sandy Bridge Pentium or Celeron, or a 760G motherboard and Sempron 145, or an AMD E-350 Pentium. Graphics cards like Geforce 210 still sold. Tech from 2009 to 2011 roughly. So for a desktop at least, it's very easy to get stuff that should be supported as long as you choose the components yourself (the store can assemble it and ship it for you) ; small "nettop" computers are good to go as well if you choose the right hardware (i.e. not AMD Kabini or Intel 22nm Atom/Celeron)

Re:Use older version..

[Just Brew It!]

As the post you replied to indicated, Ubuntu 12.04 is supported until 2017. If this accessibility issue is as serious as it sounds, certainly it will get fixed within the next 3 years?

Re:Use older version..

[Just Brew It!]

Well, something doesn't add up then. The OP states the bug was introduced in 1.13.1, yet my copy of Ubuntu 12.04 (which is current on patches) is running 1.11.3.

Re:Use older version..

[Blaskowicz]

When you install a recent iso like Ubuntu 12.04.4 you get updated linux and Xorg server, when you use 12.04.0 or 12.04.1 you have the older ones (and then you get security non destructive updates)

Re:Use older version..

[Just Brew It!]

You sure about that? The package currently installed on my system appears to match the latest one in the Ubuntu repository for precise.

Re:Use older version..

[Just Brew It!]

Huh. Confirmed. I had always assumed that the normal update process would bring you up to the latest point release within an LTS series. So I learned something today. OP could still install an older point release like 12.04.2 though. All 12.04.x releases are supported until 2017 AFAIK.

Contact the Linux Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically what you want is to escalate this issue so that it gets more attention. As this affects people with disabilities I suspect you may get some results if you try to contact the Linux Foundation, who may then be able to twist a few arms or throw some resources at the problem as needed. You could, for example, point this very thread out to "pr@linuxfoundation.com" and let them know that this is a bit of a black eye against Linux.

Re:Contact the Linux Foundation

[Endloser]

This is a very productive post. Thank you for an intelligent answer that will help this person in the future. Teach a man to fish and you feed him forever.

Re:Contact the Linux Foundation

[we3]

I'd probably start by filing a bug report with your distro, it sounds like something release critical. They likely have someone who will be able to fix this bug, and who will be able to get it upstream. They also will be better equipped to test this as they're putting together all the pieces in a distro. They are also probably more end user oriented.

Re:Contact the Linux Foundation

[VortexCortex]

and let them know that this is a bit of a black eye against Linux.

Or, you could recognize TFA as the hit-piece it is: Points to the Bug, knows what a bug tracker is, doesn't use the bug tracker to fix the issue: Open a new duplicate bug to get it re-triaged and noticed by more than just the bug assignee. Escalate the issue to other devs. It's not like the devs are saying: NO WE DO NOT GIVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT DISABLED PEOPLE GO USE MICROSOFT OR APPLE, ANYTHING BUT A FREE AND OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM.

This is a tempest in a teapot with sizable negative PR spin. I do not negotiate with terrorists. I do not speak for everyone, but to the users who jump to shaming tactics instead of resolution options: Fuck you, I don't give a flying fuck about your persecution complex. I would rather not deal with such disgusting shit-stirrers.

For future reference, Submitter, if you're reading this: How to ask a question the smart way. -- Everything here also pertains to bugs or questions like "Why isn't this fixed yet?". The answer? You reap what you sew.

Re:Contact the Linux Foundation

[wvmarle]

So you report a bug the way you're supposed to, it barely gets attention, and you think re-reporting it the same way will suddenly do the trick?

Well repeated often enough it may - but it also shows the failure of devs to use their own bug tracking system.

Re:Contact the Linux Foundation

[digitect]

"How to ask a question the smart way" is 23 pages long and starts with the presumption that the questioner do most of the work in solving the question prior to asking.

As long as we spend more effort on Slashdot explaining to a disabled, non-developer that he is wrong than it would take to fix the bug, it is will NOT be the year of Linux.

Options

[oldhack]

1. Whine and moan.

2. Fix it yourself.

3. Bribe. Offer to send a case of beer (or bag of whatever).

Re:Options

[oldhack]

Nope. You're talking about free (gratis) software, not "Open Source".

Re:Options

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

OP seemed pretty clear that #2 isn't an option, and most disabled Americans' income is too limited for a case of beer or equivalent bribe.

I wouldn't consider it whining and moaning when somebody finds a bug that breaks disability accessibility to the point that they won't be able to use their OS without a struggle, politely posts to the bugtracker about it, waits for 3 months while it's ignored, then politely posts to Slashdot asking for suggestions on how to handle it. Instead, I'd say it's maturely pointing out a legit issue and requesting help -- not every mention of a problem qualifies as a whine/moan, especially such a critical problem.

Re:Options

[oldhack]

By "whine and moan" I mean make noise to bring attention to the issue.

Re:Options

[Goetterdaemmerung]

Nope. You're talking about free (gratis) software, not "Open Source".

I was talking about the attitude of many projects in my many years of experience, free or not. Lots of asshats. Lots of superiority complexes. Lots of minimizing customer complaints and not properly testing functionality. Blaming the customer is a common trap of shitty development. This thread is full of it.

Re:Options

[oldhack]

Crappy software is crappy, "Open Source" or otherwise.

Re:Options

[westlake]

OP seemed pretty clear that #2 isn't an option, and most disabled Americans' income is too limited for a case of beer or equivalent bribe.

The same can be said for their support groups.

The question then becomes "Why have these problems been solved for years - a decade or more - in commercial/proprietary operating systems from corporate giants like Microsoft and Apple, who should - in theory - have even less interest in investing rime and money in providing services for the disabled?

Re:Options

[gnasher719]

The question then becomes "Why have these problems been solved for years - a decade or more - in commercial/proprietary operating systems from corporate giants like Microsoft and Apple, who should - in theory - have even less interest in investing rime and money in providing services for the disabled?

Microsoft and Apple probably have some legal requirements. And in addition, disabled people are customers as well. It's not just disabled people that are affected. Imagine you have five employees who need to use the same software, and one of them is disabled. You then will buy the software that works for disabled people for all five. So you have four sales to people who are not disabled _because_ you support disabled customers.

Patch link posted before your post

[gavron]

http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...

Re:Patch link posted before your post

[I'm New Around Here]

Even that poster, spitzak, calls the process he went through "painful", and the lack of completion "shocking". I glad the patch is available, and am happy that the people who really need it will be able to get it after upgrading from their unsupported versions of software they been forced to use because of the issue.

By the way, he posted one minute before I did. So while I was typing and previewing my post. And after I refreshed my screen before typing my post, to be more accurate. Don't make it seem like I was half a day behind.

Re:Patch link posted before your post

[retchdog]

Typical partisan hack commie; your ticket would bring only serfdom.

I, and any true American lover of liberty, demand a Libertarian president and Green Party vice president! ;-)

Re:Patch link posted before your post

[I'm New Around Here]

Typical partisan hack commie; your ticket would bring only serfdom.

Huh? What ticket? I'm talking about Linux, not going to the movies.

I, and any true American lover of liberty, demand a Libertarian president and Green Party vice president! ;-)

OMG!! roflmao

You got me good. :^)

But in the end, you are completely wrong and are the whole reason we can't have nice things. :^P

Re:What did you expect?

[quantaman]

It's unfortunately the worst kind of bug in a sense. A feature that affects only a small minority of users but affects them severely.

If some developer or company doesn't have a specific interest in that set of users it's really easy for the bug to get overlooked.

I wonder if this would be a good cause for a disabled rights group. Hire a dev or two to go around fixing/nagging open source projects in an effort to improve accessibility.

A few options

[raymorris]

So far, we know that Peter caused the change, Peter knows that, and Peter knows how to put it back. Peter isn't sure that it's broken since it now follows the written spec. Ideally, we'd like Peter to fix it, but for that we need to convince Peter that the new behavior is wrong and it SHOULD be reverted. If he chooses to, it will take many seconds to revert the change.

What I'd do next is find the written documentation of the behavior in earlier versions, in Windows, and OSX. YOU said they all work the other way, but the spec says otherwise. So prove your case by linking to written documentation. When you post the links, mention "the principle of least surprise", a term meaning that users should not be surprised by the behavior of the software.

Also, right now ONE person on the planet has said they don't like the new behavior. If EVERYONE in a large group is having a problem with it, a few could post saying so. I'm sure there are forums and such related to accessibility, so ask around. Find out for sure, are other people reall having great difficulty with it? If so, will they post in the ticket?

Then mail Peter and request that he look at it. You could ask how much would be a fair contribution for his time spent looking into it. (Answer - about $20 - $50).

If Peter doesn't respond, email the project maintainer, mentioning that Peter seems to be unavailable and asking that the maintainer look at it.

If those two options fail, that single-line change is so small that any Linux programmer could compile a copy for you with it reverted. It would only take a minutes. Two years from now, if an important update comes out, someone could easily do the same with the new version. Obviously that's less desireable than getting the upstream source fixed, but it fixes YOUR problem.

 

Re:A few options

[Just Brew It!]

If I'm reading the description of the issue correctly, the problem is that an option that used to modify the behavior of the Sticky Keys feature now does nothing. How is that not a bug, by any stretch of the imagination?

Re:A few options

[Todd Knarr]

I do know that even as a non-disabled user, the behavior Peter describes as "per spec" (that is, mouse buttons are not keys for the purposes of releasing the sticky keys) is counter-intuitive since the modifier keys interact with mouse buttons the same way they do with non-modifier keys (ie. Control modifies selection with mouse clicks the same way it modifies selection with the keyboard). Given that normal interaction with both non-modifier keys and mouse buttons, I'd expect instructions about how modifier keys behave to also apply analogously when both non-modifier keys and mouse buttons (but not mouse movements) are involved. Either that or I would expect modifier keys to not interact with mouse clicks the same way they do with regular keys.

Re:A few options

[grahamwest]

I just tested and OS X treats the clicks and key presses the same way when sticky keys is enabled. Hit the modifier, the next click or key press is modified. Hit the modifier twice and all clicks and key presses and modified until you hit the modifier again to unlock.

Seems very much the logical way to do it.

Re:A few options

[jrumney]

The "Lock" feature is not in the Gnome Accessibility settings, so must be a KDE specific feature. Looking at the patch that was identified as the cause of the behaviour change, it only affects mouse operation, so either another patch is involved, or the Lock feature is still working for keyboard use. The submitter's problem is with the change in behaviour for the mouse, but I'm not entirely clear why. When you use Ctrl-mouse clicks (his example for a problemetic use case), more often than not you want to select multiple items. And more often than not, the subsequent operation is a copy (Ctrl-C) or cut (Ctrl-X) event. If you really just want to Ctrl-mouse then perform a non-Ctrl operation, a simple tap of the Ctrl key toggles it out of its locked state. So the fact that mouse events now imply modifier locking even when lock is off for keyboard use (where it is less useful) seems like it could actually have been a designed feature which was broken for some time before, and only now fixed (by a change that fixed some other bugs that had nothing to do with accessibility). The submitter is upset because the behaviour of basic UI operation changed, which is understandable. But it isn't the critical issue that makes Xorg unusable for disabled users that he makes out it is. It is more like the change from menu and toolbar to a ribbon - something that users can get used to and might eventually find more efficient than the previous behaviour if they give it a chance.

Re:A few options

[Jmc23]

Logical that sticky-KEYS affects mouse-BUTTONS?

Are you seriously going to argue that with the spec neckbeards?

Re:A few options

[grahamwest]

Well it's the keys, specifically the modifier keys, that are supposed to be sticky. That doesn't imply that their stickiness can only be affected by other keys.

Re:pay someone to do it

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

I'll repeat my response to someone else above:
Most disabled people in the US are living on Supplemental Security Income of $600-850/month, and have no other source of money. Even a group of them are unlikely to be able to pool enough to hire somebody to fix a bug in something like Xorg.

Re:What did you expect?

[ShanghaiBill]

I wonder if this would be a good cause for a disabled rights group. Hire a dev or two to go around fixing/nagging open source projects

Or, alternatively, hire a lawyer, and sue x.org for violating the ADA. That is the American way.

Re:A features, an irksome burdden for most

[Just Brew It!]

X is not Windows. While I do sometimes get the annoying popup on Windows systems, I have never had that issue on my KDE desktop. Even on Windows there's a configuration option in the Control Panel to disable it. So no, it is not a "burden" to anyone, really. Unless you're using Windows (which isn't what this topic was about anyway), and are too lazy to spend 30 seconds on Google figuring out how to disable it.

I'll grant you that maybe Windows should have the feature disabled by default...

was a fix to make follow the specification

[raymorris]

The change was to make it follow the written specification, a bug fix. The reporter is saying that the bug fix wasn't, because he figures the old behavior is better.

I have no idea which way it should work, but the ticket has the submitter expressing one opinion and Peter expressing another opinion. Not long ago, I submitted a fix for a bug in an open source project. It was obviously bug, the documentation said it worked one way, the code did the opposite. I fixed it to work according to the documentation. What is was doing instead was clearly wrong. Suprisingly, the other three developers thought otherwise, and they explained why. So far, there's no evidence that anyone other than the submitter is unhappy with the fix / change.

Re:was a fix to make follow the specification

[Just Brew It!]

OK, I'm confused. You're saying that the specification states that the "Lock" option is not supposed to do anything?

Re:was a fix to make follow the specification

[grahamwest]

The spec in question - http://www.x.org/docs/XKB/XKBp... as Peter references in the bug comments - discusses StickyKeys (4.4 on page 9) and strongly implies modifiers only unlatch on key presses; mouse buttons are not mentioned. His change made the code match this reading of the spec. I have a hard time believing that's what the spec writers intended, but if so then KDE's lock checkbox really isn't supposed to do anything.

Re:was a fix to make follow the specification

[jrumney]

The submitter is exaggerating. The Lock option still works for the keyboard. It acts like it is always on for the mouse.

good point. Should be in the ticket

[raymorris]

That's a good point. Maybe someone will post it in the ticket.

Re:You fix it

[I'm New Around Here]

It should be the job of whoever made the change that broke the system a year ago.

We defend Linus going postal on someone for breaking the user interface about music (or whatever that was last year), but are supposed to accept some douche breaking the ability of handicapped people to use their keyboard?? That's fucked up, with no pulling the punches.

I've used Linux various times over the years, and my daughter's laptop has Linux Mint on it. I'm not a programmer or Linux guru, and have never claimed I was. I also don't particularly like how some in the the disabled community have subverted the Americans With Disabilities Act. But I will call bullshit on this type of bullshit every time.

Thanks for the response.

Re:What did you expect?

[quantaman]

I wonder if this would be a good cause for a disabled rights group. Hire a dev or two to go around fixing/nagging open source projects

Or, alternatively, hire a lawyer, and sue x.org for violating the ADA. That is the American way.

It sounds like you mostly want to take a shot at the ADA but looking at the link I don't see any mention of software except for the two instances where courts have ruled that websites aren't covered. Is there any precedent for a software project being sued on the basis of the ADA?

How To Handle Unfixed Linux Bug

[hcs_$reboot]

Posting a "Ask Slashdot" question may give enough publicity to this bug to have an emotional dev take care of your problem. It seems it's the way to get things done, nowadays. There was a time where open source developers guided by passion were always keen to perform lengthy anti-regression tests and urged to fix main problems. According to the more recent versions of Gnome, Gimp, VLC, ... this time is gone [the Linux kernel being an exception].

Re:How To Handle Unfixed Linux Bug

[jones_supa]

I'd like to do the classic Ballmer "developers, developers, developers" dance but instead to Linux devs and with the words "quality assurance, quality assurance, quality assurance..."

Re:A features, an irksome burdden for most

[cheesybagel]

I hate that stupid Windows Sticky Keys popup too. Then again I think this is more a problem of OS configuration than anything else.

Re:A features, an irksome burdden for most

[seebs]

Except this is totally wrong, because the burden on other users consists of "turn it off if you don't want it", which you only have to do once ever, while the people who need the accommodation are gonna have serious problems without it.

Disability accommodation is a good thing for society. Yes, it can have some costs for other people, but they are small costs and in general we can easily pay them.

Re:What did you expect?

[jrumney]

Read the bug report. The accessibility feature works. The submitter (who also happens to be the bug reporter) found a fairly minor subfeature (the ability for sticky key modifiers to act as lock keys) has been broken recently. I say fairly minor, because the only key this might be critical for in certain use cases is the Shift key, where a separate Caps Lock is already available. Exaggerating the issue by claiming it makes accessibility on Xorg unusable and bitching on slashdot because its been a whole 11 weeks since he found the problem and noone has released a fixed version yet is just grandstanding.

No, contributing is contributing. Using is selfish

[raymorris]

This user DID contribute by filing a reasonably good bug report. As to any other users who may or may not think the change is good or bad, if they didn't exist, we wouldn't get their feedback, but we also WOULDN'T CARE what non-existent people think. Therefore, the "contribution" you think they make is null. They express an opinion that matters to them, but if they didn't use the software nothing would be lost.

Authoring software helps other, so that's a contribution to the community.
Authoring documentation is a helpful contribution.
Maintaining the community, such as moderating a forum, is a helpful contribution.
Compiling packages for use with different distributions is a helpful contribution.
Careful, organized testing is a contribution that helps others.
Using the software helps noone but yourself - it's inherently selfish.

You may notice that of the five ways to contribute that I listed, only one requires programming knowledge. ANYONE who can use the software can also learn to use those same features in in an organized, comprehensive way - aka testing. Therefore the idea that "I can't contribute because I'm not a programmer" is false. Anyone saying that either a) isn't well informed about the process or b) is making excuses to be lazy.

It's plainly obvious that using some software doesn't help anyone other than yourself. Having read this post, you are not uninformed about the many ways you can contribute, starting today. So now, you are either headed off to find how you're going to contribute, or you've decided to be selfish. The excuse is gone.

Re:What did you expect?

[Blaskowicz]

Shift and Caps Lock don't necessarily have the same output!
On my keyboard, shift does 1234567890+ on the top row and Caps Lock does &É"'(-È_ÇÀ)=

XKB Specification is the problem!?

[craighansen]

Reading the bug report commentary, it appears there's an error in the specification: http://www.x.org/docs/XKB/XKBp... that Peter Hutterer propagated into the code. The specification should be fixed as well as the code. Peter's comments about the change also discuss a null-pointer dereference problem - I'm not clear how that is related to the change - and therefore whether reverting the change is the complete solution.

The specification appears to be dated 1997-12-15, so all this is blowback from 16-year-old specification error.

Having seen plenty of serious bugs sitting unfixed in bug reports for years and years, I don't think the problem of enormous bugfix latency is particularly related to or limited to acccessibility issues.

Re:A features, an irksome burdden for most

[Blaskowicz]

It only buggered me when playing Prince of Persia (the 1989 game) on Windows XP with VDMSound. So, not very much at all.

yes, better switch to something else

[stenvar]

The bug was reported in December 2013, and expecting a three month turnaround from a free project for bug fixes is a bit much. There are plenty of older distros that are still supported and work, so the sky isn't falling. And, believe me, recent Linux distros break plenty of people's user interfaces in plenty of ways that are just as inconvenient as not having sticky key work may be to you. In addition, if you really care, you can write a user-mode program to give you the same functionality.

So, my suggestion is: just switch to Windows or OS/X. I'm sure those commercial systems will give you bug fixes with three months turnaround. You deserve the kind of service and support that Microsoft and Apple give you!

Re:yes, better switch to something else

[DNS-and-BIND]

The dismissive, sarcastic, "screw you" attitude of the parent post is precisely why I long ago gave up on reporting bugs in open source software. It's just not worth it to deal with aspies who heartily enjoy abusing people who aren't in their "ecosystem". I had hoped that things had changed in the past 10 years, but unfortunately no progress has been made.

Re:yes, better switch to something else

[DNS-and-BIND]

But with open source, to many eyes all bugs are shallow. The ease of fixing broken parts of the software is one of the main strengths of open source software. Oh, was that all just a gigantic lie? LOL.

Re:yes, better switch to something else

[dbIII]

Software is not born perfect and pointing out that the bleeding edge can have problems and it may be worth reverting back when you hit problems is not "screw you".
Are there even any distros out there that have packaged this yet?

Re:yes, better switch to something else

[stenvar]

People like you are being the jerks here, because you think that you are entitled to better support from well-meaning and hard working FOSS volunteers who clearly are making an effort than you are from companies you pay a shitload of money to.

What's so outrageous about dotacohen's and your attitude is not that you want the bug to be fixed, it's that you are being abusive even though the bug was just reported a few months ago and people are obviously looking into it.

Re:yes, better switch to something else

[stenvar]

The ease of fixing broken parts of the software is one of the main strengths of open source software. Oh, was that all just a gigantic lie? LOL.

If you think that you are going to get this kind of bug fixed faster by Microsoft or Apple than by FOSS developers, you're a fool.

But as I was saying, if you really do think that, you should switch.

Re:yes, better switch to something else

[westlake]

So, my suggestion is: just switch to Windows or OS/X.

Makes perfect sense for the disabled.

When was the last time you heard a complaint about accessibility in Windows?

In addition, if you really care, you can write a user-mode program to give you the same functionality.

How do you do that if you need sticky keys and other aids to use a keyboard?

Not to mention a two or three year investment in programming skills that you have no way to pay for.

Re:yes, better switch to something else

[Arker]

If this were a bug that only affected some unnecessary eye-candy or 'feature' then I would agree with you.

A certain amount of gratitude is certainly due for a free product, but on the other hand this is a bug affecting critical system functionality which is not visible to the majority of users, and for some reason this is exactly the sort of bug that free software projects have a distressing tendency to ignore. So I think it's appropriate to ask the question if only to raise awareness. It may be that none of the Xorg core use these features and they simply are not aware of how critical they are.

In this case I gather it's been three months so it's appropriate to be asking questions. Not appropriate to be abusive towards the developers, but TFA was not doing that.

Distros downstream choose when to rev and as long as xorg gets it fixed before downstream revs then it should cause no one any problem. If you are using a bleeding edge distro that merges critical software with critical bugs and does not see the problem, I would recommend changing distros.

Re:yes, better switch to something else

[stenvar]

but on the other hand this is a bug affecting critical system functionality which is not visible to the majority of users, and for some reason this is exactly the sort of bug that free software projects have a distressing tendency to ignore

This bug was reported in December 2013 and has been discussed in the bug tracker since, so it isn't being "ignored". However, if people did choose to ignore it, that would be completely OK. Developers fix what interests them, perhaps because they need it themselves or because a friend needs it. Nobody has any obligation to even pay attention to what some outside person wants, disabled or not.

In this case I gather it's been three months so it's appropriate to be asking questions.

Bug fixes often take 1-2 years even for high priority bugs. To expect a bug fix after three months is totally unreasonable. I run distros that are several years out of date because newer distros have broken things that I depend on. And for the accessibility bug, there are numerous simple workarounds that anybody with half a brain can figure out.

The submitter was behaving like a total prick when he asked "Should disabled users stick with outdated, vulnerable, and unsupported Linux distros or should we move to OS-X / Windows?"

Re:yes, better switch to something else

[Arker]

"However, if people did choose to ignore it, that would be completely OK."

Uh, no. It would be far from ok.

"Developers fix what interests them, perhaps because they need it themselves or because a friend needs it."

Pretty sure some of those developers are paid, and this crap doesnt work for them. Nor for the project as a whole. Sure, you do what interests you. But if you are adding features and neglecting critical bugs you suck, and need to go back to McDonalds.

"Bug fixes often take 1-2 years even for high priority bugs."

If true, that is absolutely pathetic, and makes the more forlorn parts of TFA sound much more understandable.

"To expect a bug fix after three months is totally unreasonable."

Oh bullshit. This is a bug that was introduced with a known commit and can easily be fixed by simply backing out that change. A change that should have been rejected immediately in the first place. What's totally unreasonable is to introduce a bug in critical system architecture and then wait months to fix it. If that's how you work your commit privileges need revoked. And that would arguably still be true if it were some provincial project no one cared about.

We are talking about x.org here. There is no excuse.

Tks a lot

[quynhanh0696]

Tks a lot! http://www.lapdatmangcmc.com/2...

Re:No, contributing is contributing. Using is self

[dbc]

Using the software helps noone but yourself - it's inherently selfish.

That's an overly-simplistic analysis. Using software has network effects. ('Network' in the social sense, not the move bits from point A to point B sense.)

Simply being a user that uses Libre Office and trades documents with others in that format grows the network of Libre Office users. That is a beneficial network effect. Simply being a user of X-Windows creates a larger pool of X-Windows users and therefore more potential seats for any random X-Windows application, which is a beneficial network effect for X-Windws in general, in that it creates more potential reward for development effort spent on X-Windows applications.

I agree with your other points, especially about the benefits of organized testing and filing clear problem reports. You can't (or shouldn't) ship what you can't test.

except that 0 * x = 0. it's good because it's good

[raymorris]

In summary, you said:
More users is good because it results in more users.

If adding one non-contributing user has no benefit other than attracting another, the total benefit is two users multiplied by zero contribution = zero.

Childish

[Anonymous Coward]

"A post about how a regression in Xorg (and thus mainstream Linux distros) is negatively affecting handicapped Linux users? TIME TO MAKE FUN OF WINDOWS!"

I used to consider myself a big fan of the Linux community, but seeing stuff like that over and over for years on end has REALLY turned me off the community (which also makes me view Linux a bit more negatively because Linux s community-powered). Hell, even that broken-window logo for that Slashdot uses for Windows stories reeks of childishness. It would be one thing is posts like this were just one-time time things, but it's not. It's relentless.

Re:Childish

[gonnagetya]

Agreed. It's even worse when you realize just how many accessibility features exist in Windows - they've got almost everything, and you can expect them to work given there's high visibility of the operating system compared to most Linux distros. But of course people prefer to joke instead of accept the fact that Linux distros simply don't have the same level of support for accessibility features as seen in the proprietary systems, and that continual joking is why I don't bother with Linux for my own system anymore.

Re:Childish

[Rockoon]

..and you can expect them to work given there's high visibility of the operating system compared to most Linux distros.

..and the fact that its a legal requirement.

There are plenty of laws you can just go ahead and break and not expect severe repercussions, but when you go ahead and stick it to handicapped people well thats a story thats going to have its own legs, where even being "technically right" isnt going to shield you from the onslaught.

Re:Childish

[HiThere]

Do you really think the US is the only country? Various different countries have various different requuirements about how users need to be supported. The ADA is only one magic wand.

Use windows

[zmooc]

Just use windows. It doesn't really work any better but at least they don't break core functionality a few times a year and then take months to fix it...

Ok maybe I'm exaggerating and this is only an Ubuntu problem; it's been years since I've been annoying-bug-free for more than 3 months with...

The bug is asking for the wrong fix

[tlambert]

Read the bug report. The accessibility feature works. The submitter (who also happens to be the bug reporter) found a fairly minor subfeature (the ability for sticky key modifiers to act as lock keys) has been broken recently. I say fairly minor, because the only key this might be critical for in certain use cases is the Shift key, where a separate Caps Lock is already available.

The bug is asking for the wrong fix

Different modifiers have different combinatorial effects. Caps Lock is not necessarily Caps Lock, in other words. I know that most Linux people hate them because they are cheap, and you have to do a "disable secure boot" dance to install Linux on them, but ChromeBooks, in particular, lack a Caps Lock key. Caps Lock is achieved by hitting both shift keys simultaneously.

If that isn't convincing enough, consider Alt-Gr vs. Right-Alt behaviour on international keyboards that report a USB HID country code of 00h.

While I was working on ChromeOS at Google, there were a number of obvious usability issues for the OS, but the majority of them stemmed from the need to upstream support into Linux, and the difficulty of doing this without involving an Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, or similar personage when you were dealing with things which crossed area boundaries. Input is one of these areas, and it was rather difficult and roundabout to get support for non-adjusted raw system time stamps in evdev inputs, even as a non-default option.

Exaggerating the issue by claiming it makes accessibility on Xorg unusable and bitching on slashdot because its been a whole 11 weeks since he found the problem and noone has released a fixed version yet is just grandstanding.

I agree the issue is exaggerated, but mostly because I disagree about where in the input stack usability issues should be addressed. The usability belongs in the input stack, as does the internationalization, below the point at which events are reported to the console, or to X (or Wayland or whatever display server is handling the apps and forwarding the input events).

It's pretty easy to see where this breaks down by enabling "programmer mode" (meaning: disabling "secure boot mode") on a ChromeBook, and enabling root or other console logins. It's easy to see the shift-shift (or Caps Lock, if you plug in a standard USB keyboard) and internationalized input don't work the same on the console as they do in the graphical environment.

In general, the input stack in Linux has a *lot* of problems. A fun experiment to try is plugging in 3 or 4 USB keyboards, and playing with the Caps Lock; the light goes on or off on whatever keyboard you're playing with it on, but the actual Caps Lock state depends on whether you've hit the Caps Lock key on an even or odd number of keyboards, and the keyboard Caps Lock lights very quickly become desynchronized from the actual Caps Lock state (i.e. turning Caps Lock on on keyboard A lights the light on A, and hitting it on B turns it on on B, rather than off on A, even though the state is that Caps Lock is no longer in effect).

Similar issues occur when using sticky modifiers for usability, and when moving between virtual consoles with various modifier/Caps Lock/etc. states in effect.

I understand the idea that you may wish to explicitly allocate resources in a multihead environment, but the input stack really doesn't do that very well, either - these modifiers should happen in the input stream above a stream join as a resource allocate by a virtual console or display server, and not in the display server or the underlying driver.

Windows doesn't support multihead well (at all, for multiple sessions, without something like Citrix intermediating the process), but it also doesn't screw up on where it put the internationalization translation tables and the dispatch routines and the usability.

PS: In case you care, AFAIK, there are zero vendors who put the correct internationalization keyboard code type in the USB

Re:The bug is asking for the wrong fix

[dissy]

Windows doesn't support multihead well (at all, for multiple sessions, without something like Citrix intermediating the process), but it also doesn't screw up on where it put the internationalization translation tables and the dispatch routines and the usability.

Actually it does, frighteningly well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

You are quite correct however, this is a painfully ridiculous situation with the input handlers in Linux.
Multiseat and multihead seems so perfectly fitting as something Linux should be doing, but it fails miserably from the start due to the input handlers.

The real kick in the teeth bit about the Windows solution? You have to pay a full OS license for each seat/head configured!
If your goals are anything more complex than "I just wanted to see if it would work" then this licensing detail makes Windows pretty much the worst OS for such a use case, despite being the only OS that handles it correctly at the input layer.

A "shame the developer" post to Slashdot...

[tlambert]

A "shame the developer" post to Slashdot is not the same thing as pinging the developer directly, and makes this really undesirable to fix, as it implies that similar pressure would work on the same developer in the future. If I'm a volunteer, I really don't appreciate you making demands on my time with the threat of publicly thrown tomatoes to back up your demands should I not meet them in a fashion you consider timely.

It's also pretty ass to insist on a release schedule for a change (see previous post: what the OP wants is technically not a "fix", since it perpetuates inappropriate software layering) to software which is not normally released on a schedule, and which does not have specific changes preannounced until the code is actually done, since they may or may not make a particular release.

If you want that, with respect, you should consider running only Canonical releases, and buying a support contract from Canonical, or if you don't like that, make friends with someone else who has already bought one.

Re:A "shame the developer" post to Slashdot...

[hink]

And yet others in the Slashdot crowd chant "use the bug tracking system". Seems like asking for a schedule to fix is part of that system.

I imagine there are more than a few Linux users who know what open-source is, but still don't know every nuance of bug tracking, They just want their stuff to keep working.

Is there any distribution that offers paid-for-support aimed at individual users?

Re:What did you expect?

[sumdumass]

I don't remember if it was softwsre itself or the government entity using it, but there have been some lawsuits that i can remember hearing about concerning accesability features. It had to do with government using software.

Re:Fix it yourself you

[jones_supa]

Small tweaks are doable, but even then you will get a lot of hassle. You will spend a good amount reading source code, setting up the build environment and after that maintaining your own fork if the upstream didn't accept your change.

For anything larger, you will also need to acquire a large amount of understanding how the particular system works before you can make the proper change. For example, good luck fixing a graphics driver bug (even if it looks like a simple glitch) if you do not know how graphics drivers work. Getting familiar with the bigger picture will take weeks or months.

Now, that does not mean that open source is not useful. The people familiar with graphics drivers (for example, Freedesktop and Mesa guys) can collaborate using open source. But they are experts in their field. If you are outside of this specific expertise, your best bet is usually writing accurate bug reports. You cannot go there and fix everything that is broken just because you have the source.

Try this sometimes. When you find a bug in open source software, take the responsibility of fixing it properly and sending the patch. Doooo it, walk the walk. The point is that you will notice how much work it all involves.

Pay for the fix here

[hweimer]

You can put up a bounty for this bug here. Right now, Bountysource accepts only Google Wallet and Paypal, but support for Bitcoins is in the works.

Re:A features, an irksome burdden for most

[jones_supa]

Hahaa, I got bitten by it by playing Prince of Persia too!

Anyway, for everyone, here are the precise instructions for disabling it:

1) Open Control Panel
2) Go to "Ease of Access"
3) Click "Make the keyboard easier to use"
4) Click "Set up Sticky Keys"
5) Uncheck "Turn on Sticky Keys when SHIFT is pressed five times"
6) Click "OK"

Re:use a user-friendly operating system

[blackest_k]

Yesterday I was involved in an issue installing reason5 on a mac running maverick
it doesn't work using normal instalation methods.

Later versions version 6 and version 7 do but require more resources and a new licence. There is more than one program on OSX which doesn't work with Maverick.

I did get it working by installing the (3.9GB) demo version of reason 7 it patched the system and while having that open and running I was able to install reason 5 (it overwrote the reason 7 files) a couple of files also had to be copied into the reason folder from the reason5 install disc. However once i'd done this Reason version 5 was installed and running correctly.

So from my experience with OSX I'd have to conclude that it is user friendly except for the times when it isn't.
Much like other operating systems really.

I do wish developers would try to be helpful when their programs crash or fail. Or failing that a program like snoopdos from the Amiga would be wonderful. This program would monitor a program and tell you where it succeeded or failed. The Amiga used shared library files much like .dll files on windows Snoopdos would tell you the version number it was looking for and if it failed it might be something like arp.lib version 1.4 and version 1.3 was installed so it would normally be a matter of finding version 1.4 or later putting that in the libs folder and then the call would succeed. The nice thing about libs was that later versions extended functionality but never removed existing functions. Other calls might be for a particular font to be loaded and you would know that was needed to get the program to work. I know Amiga os is a dinosaur in todays world but they got a few things spot on.

 

Use it in the next version after the fix

[dbIII]

If you can't fix it and the fix is slow, stay on the old one and then use it in the next version after the fix. That's what we all have to do with commercial software when a new version with bugs appears after all.

Old bugs out and new bugs in is the story of many projects.

Re:What did you expect?

[dbIII]

Well on some keyboards there is no "one" key and you just use a lower case "L" instead to get an equivalent output. It gets the job done on a manual typewriter.
Have you worked out yet that I think your edge case is utterly stupid grasping at straws to try to justify a pre-decided position at any cost?

Re:Fix it yourself you

[jones_supa]

Ok.

It should be obvious

[dbIII]

It should be obvious - some of the stuff on the bleeding edge doesn't bleeding work properly.

The answer, as always, is revert until whoever is getting the new stuff to work manages to get the job done.
It's an unfortunate situation but bound to recur over and over as bugs and shortcomings that were not noticed before release surface afterwards.

With some commercial software I've had to instruct a user to go back to the 2009 version to get around a bug the current developers introduced and didn't catch. In a year or two they may fix it in the current version or maybe not, they are making no promises for support that could buy a couple of 64 core machines a year instead. That sort of thing sucks, and a really good test suite modified as required can cut down how often it happens, but with complex enough stuff it is going to happen and all you can do is make sure the next unexpected case is not unexpected the next time.

Re:except that 0 * x = 0. it's good because it's g

[dbc]

No, that is *not* what I said. More users is good because more users results in more development effort.

Sadly ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... things like this lend credibility to go-your-own-way efforts, like Mir. It's not just the display server, though. I have to wonder if Google's grip on Android isn't, at least in part, inspired by occurances such as this. Open source is like a incredibly diverse and richly dynamic orchestra, that sometimes lacks for a conductor.

Re:nothing is broken

[jedidiah]

On the other hand, the idea that an older version of Linux is "vulnerable" is just trollish hogwash.

Re:except that 0 * x = 0. it's good because it's g

[Wycliffe]

In summary, you said:
More users is good because it results in more users.

If adding one non-contributing user has no benefit other than attracting another, the total benefit is two users multiplied by zero contribution = zero.

Even if this is true eventually one of these "non-contributing" users will attract a contributing user whether that contribution
is giving back to the software, buying a support package, buying software that runs on X, developing software on X, etc..

FreedomSponsors

[BradMajors]

FreedomSponsors https://freedomsponsors.org/ is a much better platform for crowd sourcing.

Re:Fix it yourself you

[Wootery]

Please, please stop this culture of disclaiming things that were never claimed.

Disagree. It's important to give the 'whole story'. It follows quite naturally - jones_supa conceded that the 'everyone can contribute' aspect of Open Source can be held back by the need to be a domain expert, but then went on to make it clear this wasn't a fatal blow to the whole idea.

Reading comprehension be damned, it's a more useful comment for being complete.

fix for Gentoo Linux

[dweezil-n0xad]

put this patch in /etc/portage/patches/x11-base/xorg-server/
stickykeysfix.patch

It simply reverts the problem causing commit and now sticky keys are released after a mouseclick on my system. I don't know if this introduces other bugs though.

Posting to Slashdot, not Linux community.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

So far 13 posts, and most of them are unhelpful drivel. Way to prove Linux is superior.

This thread shows a lot of what is wrong in the Linux community.

This thread does nothing of the sort.

The problem was posted to Slashdot. The bulk of the ENORMOUS Slashdot community is NOT the tiny subset of the Linux community that actually hacks Xorg. So the bulk of the comments are by people TALKNIG ABOUT IT but not actually involved with a fix.

But a FEW of the people who are either involved, or know how to do this stuff, DID dig right in. Above here you find posts describing work that isolated the patch that broke the feature and makig a start on identifying a fix. Near by is another set of posts showing that the actual developers were already on it, had already made a fix, and were discussing the schedule of the fix's release.

So it looks to me like the posting DID do EXACTLY what RMS says such things do:
  - It got someone to start working on a fix - and make substantial progress in a matter of hours. If there wasn't already a fix in the pipe this would have put it there.
  - It identified that the maintainers are already on it and the fix is probably coming out in a future release Real Soon Now (TM).
  - It may, very shortly (if it hasn't already) make a patch (or several) available for those who can't wait.
  - It has probably lit a fire under the regular maintainers.
And, of course, because it's Slashdot:
  - It has created a LOT of talk about it - much of it uninformed, much of it griping, with a few jems of pure-quill information.

If you focus on the large volume of cabbaging and meta-discussion by interested but uninvolved parties, it's easy to miss that EXACTLY what was desired HAS occurred and IS occurring.

And let's see any commercial provider of proprietary and closed-source software react this quickly, now that the poster has found a forum where submitting a bug report gets attention and feedback.

Change Open Source yourself?

[DTentilhao]

"It is commonly said that open source software is preferable because if you need something changed, you can change it yourself".

First I've heard you have to change it yourself. Previously, when I had a problem with a video application, I contacted the developers directly and got a satisfactory response.

Re:pay someone to do it

[manu0601]

If you lack both skills and money, it seems you are busted. Perhaps you have the available time to acquire the skills?

XP?

[bbsalem]

This discussion reminds me a bit of the one surrounding Windows XP and the thousands of installations that still depend on it. Microsoft is trying to pull the plug on it and encourage those people to change to something else. Doubtless there are some who will not want to change. They are going to have to pay to get under the hood and maintain their systems. That may ultimately apply here, but who is going to pay in terms of time or money? One can hope that there is a stakeholder with enough resources to fix the problem.

I am one of those people with a disability, but I know that I don't have to skill to hack the display driver to fix a problem like the one reported here. The glowing promise of Open Source does me no direct good if I had the problem. I am stuck until someone in the community or some developer supporting the standard creates a fix. If it was a showstopper, I'd have to figure out how to publicize the issue in such a way that it appears on the radar of someone capable of doing something about it. I'd begin with the vendor of the Linux I am running, and if vision or coordination was the accessabilitty issue for me, I'd enlist the help on someone able-bodied to do the necessary research and to present the issue on support forums, maybe at X.org. If the product is used by the government, then the weight of the ADA law might apply, and X.org might have to come out with a patch in short order, for if at least one Federal worker is stopped by the issue, the law can force the vendors to come up with a reasonable fix. There are lots of ways to change priorities on matters like this.

Pot, Kettle, Black

[DaveV1.0]

Pay to get a dev introduced bug fixed? Where have I heard that before?

Oh, yes, I heard it here on Slashdot. FLOSS supporters were bitterly ripping closed source software for "forcing people to pay for bug fixes".