July 09, 2019

Developer breaks the OS, refuses to fix - this is how it goes in the wonderful open source world

Developer breaks the OS, refuses to fix - this is how it goes in the wonderful open source world

Some time between Fedora 19 and Fedora 26 the mainatiner of xrdp broke something in his code. One can no longer connect from Windows to Linux via RDP. A minor inconvenience for the developer, but a huge one for those who relied on administering their Linux environments from a Windows host. Does not happen, you say? It does.

What do you do when you come across a Linux bug? If you have been reading my blog, you already know that first you have to track down the proper venue. Some developers are on SourceForge, others are on GitHub, there is a wild bunch who have their own sites, forums or blogs, etc. And finally, there are maillists.

This one did respond to the Fedora's bugzilla ticket quite promptly, to give him a credit. But his response was "Install Gnome and re-test". Well, not helpful, by my standards. If you followed my blog, you would have known, that I do not use Gnome since the v.3 fiasco and have switched to Mate.

The xrdp developer never tested his code with anything other than Gnome: neither KDE, nor Lxde, nor Mate, etc. have been tested. If he only tested, he would have noticed. But he does not care, as he only uses Gnome. And so he pushed an untested piece of code into the main repo of Fedora, breaking it for everyone in the world.

And being a developer, I do not blame another developer for introducing a bug, as to err is human and things happen. I blame the rest of smug, arrogant, condescending "open source community" for accepting a pre-release quality piece of code into the main repo and giving it a blessing to be released without challenging the need for a change and scrutinizing the change.

As I am an active user of Linux and UNIX for the last 20+ years, I am abreast of the development along the years and could not help but notice that over the past 3-4 years the only change from version to version of Fedora is GUI layout. There have been no valuable new functions added to Linux for almost a decade, but re-drawing icons, adding useless animations, removing panel resizing, adding gigantic panels which bear no valuable information but take monitor space is ever accelerating.

I am all for allowing novice developers a chance to prove themselves and enhance their resume, but not at my cost!!! They should not be allowed to destroy things with impunity and contribute nothing of value. When is this madness going to end?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 464 words, total size 3 kb.




What colour is a green orange?




16kb generated in CPU 0.0232, elapsed 0.1326 seconds.
35 queries taking 0.1163 seconds, 125 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.