What to expect from developers, are there any left? (was Re: rotate button sucks on the XO)

[Daniel Drake]

2009/3/2 NoiseEHC <NoiseEHC at freemail.hu>:
> My main problem is that knowing who is more responsible requires knowing
> linux more that I am comfortable with (I am a Windows developer). Here are
> just 3 examples to show my point:
> 1. Today I noticed that my simple program can crash the whole sugar desktop
> and the X server. Shall I report it to somewhere? I do not even know where
> to look for log files to attach to a bug report. Also if nobody will fix it
> (I cannot fix it that is sure...) then why should I care? Does it mean that
> if no deployment will bark that the desktop&X can be crashed then it will
> not be fixed ever?

If in doubt, report it to your distribution. Just like you would on
your main desktop.
It doesn't matter if you don't know how to debug or diagnose. Your
distribution should have channels to help you figure that out.

I don't understand why you deduce that nobody will fix whatever
problem you are running into.

And yes, in terms of the now-halted OLPC OS distribution, it is
unlikely that there will be further OLPC OS releases unless
deployments specifically ask. It takes a lot of OLPC engineering and
QA time, and OLPC now has very few resources on those fronts.  If you
are looking to be using a software platform that is evolving, then you
have to switch away from one where development has stopped :)

> 2. I can reliably (100%) trigger the "cannot connect to WPA and the dialog
> asks for a password endlessly" bug but unfortunately I do not know how to
> debug that thing. To tell you the truth I do not even know where to look for
> the code of NetworkManager (somebody told that this can be the problem) and
> even if I knew it usually I cannot compile downloaded linux code for some
> arcane reason beyond my understanding. So for example in this situation what
> should I do? Is this NetworkManager part of some linux distro, or is it an
> XO thing? If it is part of fedora, who should I report bugs to?

Yes, NetworkManager is a package included in different Linux
distributions, such as Fedora. You should report this problem to your
distribution and see where things go from there. There is probably a
report already. Google will help you find the code for networkmanager.

Note that wireless bugs are very hard to fix. Especially in our case,
because theres a big black box (the firmware) which is the cause of
many of these issues. Don't be demotivated from filing other bug
reports if the wireless one does not move quickly...

> Note that I am totally aware that these things are not your responsibility,
> I would just like to have some answers from somebody. If the solution is
> installing some distro then I will do it, the big question is that which one
> will be the official one?

I don't think there will be an official one - that will be up to the
users and deployments.
Fedora seems to be the one with the most traction at the moment.

> This is not an activity in the strictest sense, it is more like a library
> which shows what the XO hardware can do in animation. After that probably I
> will use the lessons learned to optimize GCompris and PyGame because
> currently they look like Powerpoint presentations... So the whole point is
> to work fast on a physical XO hardware.

OK, then my suggestion is to develop it as a distro-independent
upstream project (e.g. like NetworkManager), and then package it for
your favourite distribution and encourage other distributions to
follow along. This is exactly the same process for if you were
developing software for any hardware platform.

Daniel