3 ms·

The code does seem pretty bad. At the minimum, if such a hack is necessary for some reason, it should have been documented. But let's be mature about this. Ubu

by rlpb 14y ago

The code does seem pretty bad. At the minimum, if such a hack is necessary for some reason, it should have been documented. But let's be mature about this. Ubuntu is a combined effort and includes a lot of volunteer work. Have you sent a quiet note to the developer who wrote this code? His name is plainly visible on the quilt patch. Why you have to call out open source code that you think is bad in an open forum? Have you looked at openssl recently, for example? Why is this worse? Or is it just because Ubuntu is everyone's favorite target at the moment? You're being affected because of a pretty obscure use case (NFS home directories), which is something that the vast majority of Ubuntu desktop users do not use. Do you have a support contract with Canonical for your large enterprise deployment? If you don't and prefer to go it on your own, then why haven't you submitted a patch for this yourself? Have you asked for a full refund? If you don't like "the Ubuntu clown car", why are you riding on it at all?

hp50g 14y ago
I agree with this approach of pointing it out and shaming the gigantic turd. The whole thing is a mess and there is absolutely fuck all you will get out of canonical by either mailing them or raising on launchpad, paid up support or not. I've been on the end of this sort of problem a number of times and only the interesting and easy to recreate issues are resolved (and some of them like two major MySQL issues I raised on an LTS release are unresolved after 3 years even though we were paid landscape and supported users). And the approach the article points out is pretty normal if you have a LAN with multiple Unix style machines on it. I expect the article writer is considering replacing clown cars with Volvos (debian stable).
- rlpb 14y ago
  > The whole thing is a mess and there is absolutely fuck all you will get out of canonical by either mailing them or raising on launchpad, paid up support or not. It's open source. For some reason you seem to have unrealistic expectations here. If you're prepared to do the work to fix it, then you'll be heard. If you're not, then you'll only hear echoes of yourself complaining that the problem isn't being fixed. If Ubuntu has introduced a patch over Debian or upstream, there's usually a reason for it. Here, it looks like it's adding some kind of useful functionality for standalone users. > and some of them like two major MySQL issues I raised on an LTS release are unresolved after 3 years even though we were paid landscape and supported users MySQL is a particularly sore point. Upstream (Oracle) have a closed VCS and bug tracker. There's very little that can be done about MySQL issues except to wait for Oracle to fix them. Slackware and Arch have already moved away from MySQL for this reason. If you have a packaging issue, then Ubuntu in time inherits whatever Debian's packaging have done there. There's little different between Debian and Ubuntu's MySQL packaging (they happen to mostly be looked after by the same person wearing two different hats, anyway). I fail to see how Debian is better here in the general case. Ubuntu inherits most of Debian's goodness. In areas where differs, yes Ubuntu can introduce bugs not present in Debian. But it usually differs in the first place because there is extra functionality available in Ubuntu aimed at the everyday user. Again, I think most of the complaints about Ubuntu are really complaints that the open source world isn't fixing your special issue. Ubuntu just tends to get the flak because it is popular. People have fewer expectations from other distros for some reason, even though they are all based on the same upstream sources.
  - hp50g 14y ago
    It's not "open source specific" when you have a support contract with Canonical. Also if it's a high profile package, there is a moral obligation to do a proper job. MySQL issue was fixed by a minor version upgrade on all other platforms including Debian stable! LTS should include that upgrade but it has been frozen at a broken version for 3 years. That is simply unacceptable and purely incompetent. Debian are actually responsive and take defects seriously. Canonical actually break more stuff than they improve. Seriously though, if I phone up Microsoft (we have a support contract along the same lines of Canonical), the actually get a fix to us in quite shockingly good times. We had an SQL server issue and we had a binary hotfix in two days flat. Canonical just do a shit job - simple as.
    - rlpb 14y ago
      A minor version upgrade violates Ubuntu's stable release updates policy, which is to backport fixes only. And as I've said, this is very difficult when MySQL upstream keep their VCS private. An Ubuntu developer could try and get a micro release exception in place for MySQL, but as I say this is a MySQL-specific problem. Canonical cannot trump Ubuntu policy.
      - hp50g 14y ago
        Tracking minor versions was part of the LTS policy at the time as we had minor updates before the shit version got thrown at us. This is 10.04 for ref. Were talking v5.0.30 -> v5.0.31 here (these aren't the actual versions as I don't have them in front of me). Also it says in our support contract what the policy is. We no longer have any support contract - waste of money.
        rlpb 14y ago
        The security team have no option but to throw minor updates in for MySQL because upstream keep their security patches secret. Non-security updates don't currently get this treatment. It sounds like this is what happened to you.
- davidgerard 14y ago
  I concur that reporting Canonical-caused bugs is pretty much futile.
cnvogel 14y ago
I did network-admin work up to about 5 years ago in a small university deployment (a few dozen workstations), and we had the classical NFS+NIS setup that used to work more or less out of the box. Ubuntu itself was a nice distribution to administer, but even then a lot of the new X-kit and X-daemons that were developed to make single-user machines easier to run had flaws I had to work around. But more often that not it seems that solutions are integrated as core-components in Ubuntu which are obviously not sufficiently thought trough: When a service for administering user-accounts is brought in, I'd at least expect someone to ponder how it will integrate with the different sources of user-account data (local files, NIS/YP, LDAP, Microsoft-AD, nss-sql-something-?, ...), and "iterating over all users(groups" is definitely a no-go in any large deployment. Having to deploy this today would probably mean that I'd just disable that service, or replace it with a dummy, or re-code it in python, or ... but of course that would be one additional thing to "repair" in the default-install, and annoying to the sysadmin.
- tankenmate 14y ago
  I have been bitten in similar ways by gdm; on 8.04 and 10.04 gdm would only read /etc/passwd, it would totally ignore nsswitch.conf. The patch to fix this was relatively easy to make but annoying nonetheless.

by rlpb 14y ago

hp50g 14y ago

I agree with this approach of pointing it out and shaming the gigantic turd. The whole thing is a mess and there is absolutely fuck all you will get out of canonical by either mailing them or raising on launchpad, paid up support or not. I've been on the end of this sort of problem a number of times and only the interesting and easy to recreate issues are resolved (and some of them like two major MySQL issues I raised on an LTS release are unresolved after 3 years even though we were paid landscape and supported users). And the approach the article points out is pretty normal if you have a LAN with multiple Unix style machines on it. I expect the article writer is considering replacing clown cars with Volvos (debian stable).

rlpb 14y ago
> The whole thing is a mess and there is absolutely fuck all you will get out of canonical by either mailing them or raising on launchpad, paid up support or not. It's open source. For some reason you seem to have unrealistic expectations here. If you're prepared to do the work to fix it, then you'll be heard. If you're not, then you'll only hear echoes of yourself complaining that the problem isn't being fixed. If Ubuntu has introduced a patch over Debian or upstream, there's usually a reason for it. Here, it looks like it's adding some kind of useful functionality for standalone users. > and some of them like two major MySQL issues I raised on an LTS release are unresolved after 3 years even though we were paid landscape and supported users MySQL is a particularly sore point. Upstream (Oracle) have a closed VCS and bug tracker. There's very little that can be done about MySQL issues except to wait for Oracle to fix them. Slackware and Arch have already moved away from MySQL for this reason. If you have a packaging issue, then Ubuntu in time inherits whatever Debian's packaging have done there. There's little different between Debian and Ubuntu's MySQL packaging (they happen to mostly be looked after by the same person wearing two different hats, anyway). I fail to see how Debian is better here in the general case. Ubuntu inherits most of Debian's goodness. In areas where differs, yes Ubuntu can introduce bugs not present in Debian. But it usually differs in the first place because there is extra functionality available in Ubuntu aimed at the everyday user. Again, I think most of the complaints about Ubuntu are really complaints that the open source world isn't fixing your special issue. Ubuntu just tends to get the flak because it is popular. People have fewer expectations from other distros for some reason, even though they are all based on the same upstream sources.
- hp50g 14y ago
  It's not "open source specific" when you have a support contract with Canonical. Also if it's a high profile package, there is a moral obligation to do a proper job. MySQL issue was fixed by a minor version upgrade on all other platforms including Debian stable! LTS should include that upgrade but it has been frozen at a broken version for 3 years. That is simply unacceptable and purely incompetent. Debian are actually responsive and take defects seriously. Canonical actually break more stuff than they improve. Seriously though, if I phone up Microsoft (we have a support contract along the same lines of Canonical), the actually get a fix to us in quite shockingly good times. We had an SQL server issue and we had a binary hotfix in two days flat. Canonical just do a shit job - simple as.
  - rlpb 14y ago
    A minor version upgrade violates Ubuntu's stable release updates policy, which is to backport fixes only. And as I've said, this is very difficult when MySQL upstream keep their VCS private. An Ubuntu developer could try and get a micro release exception in place for MySQL, but as I say this is a MySQL-specific problem. Canonical cannot trump Ubuntu policy.
    - hp50g 14y ago
      Tracking minor versions was part of the LTS policy at the time as we had minor updates before the shit version got thrown at us. This is 10.04 for ref. Were talking v5.0.30 -> v5.0.31 here (these aren't the actual versions as I don't have them in front of me). Also it says in our support contract what the policy is. We no longer have any support contract - waste of money.
      - rlpb 14y ago
        The security team have no option but to throw minor updates in for MySQL because upstream keep their security patches secret. Non-security updates don't currently get this treatment. It sounds like this is what happened to you.
davidgerard 14y ago
I concur that reporting Canonical-caused bugs is pretty much futile.

cnvogel 14y ago

I did network-admin work up to about 5 years ago in a small university deployment (a few dozen workstations), and we had the classical NFS+NIS setup that used to work more or less out of the box. Ubuntu itself was a nice distribution to administer, but even then a lot of the new X-kit and X-daemons that were developed to make single-user machines easier to run had flaws I had to work around. But more often that not it seems that solutions are integrated as core-components in Ubuntu which are obviously not sufficiently thought trough: When a service for administering user-accounts is brought in, I'd at least expect someone to ponder how it will integrate with the different sources of user-account data (local files, NIS/YP, LDAP, Microsoft-AD, nss-sql-something-?, ...), and "iterating over all users(groups" is definitely a no-go in any large deployment. Having to deploy this today would probably mean that I'd just disable that service, or replace it with a dummy, or re-code it in python, or ... but of course that would be one additional thing to "repair" in the default-install, and annoying to the sysadmin.

tankenmate 14y ago
I have been bitten in similar ways by gdm; on 8.04 and 10.04 gdm would only read /etc/passwd, it would totally ignore nsswitch.conf. The patch to fix this was relatively easy to make but annoying nonetheless.