[SGVLUG] Developers fast to fix open-source bugs

[David Lawyer]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 05:41:35PM -0700, Dustin Laurence wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 08, 2006 at 12:00:55PM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 07:10:27PM -0700, matti wrote:
> > > fyi - thought this was interesting
> > > 
> > > best
> > > matti
> > > Developers fast to fix open-source bugs
> > > http://news.com.com/Developers+fast+to+fix+open-source+bugs/2100-1002_3-6057669.html
> > 
> > My experience has been the opposite.  Some Debian packages like
> > linuxdoc-tools, or hwclock (part of package util-linux), are (or were)
> > unmaintained so bug report accumulate, including ones that include
> > code to fix the bug.  But years go by and it never gets fixed because
> > there's no maintainer.
> 
> I have a nice little proprietary Commodore 64 word processor, and there
> haven't been any bug fixes in years!
> 
> Dustin, "in other words, if you are counting unmaintained FLOSS
>          packages, you must also count all the abandoned proprietary
>          programs which have no maintainer either"

Funny, but hwclock is in the util-linux package which is "essential" per
Debian.  So everyone gets a package where one of it's most advanced
functions, automatic compensation for drift of your battery-powered
clock, doesn't work because of a bad Debian script to start/stop it.
It sets itself up to run each time you boot.  So almost everyone
running Debian (and likely many other distributions of Linux) is
running it even though they may not realize it's being run at startup
and shutdown.

			David Lawyer