strace broken in 7.0?
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Thu Jan 10 13:16:58 PST 2008
On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Timo Schoeler wrote:
> So a 'conservative development model' (the BSDs where typically known for)
> leads to a well functioning environment. The only BSD I know of where this
> really *is* the case is OpenBSD. NetBSD, e.g., had times where their tree
> didn't build (especially for me between 3.99.3 and 3.99.15 on macppc).
> FreeBSD has a damn high number of open/unfixed PRs, and people complain more
> and more that this harms them in several ways.
I think you make a number of important points, but I want to make one
observation regarding PR count: the number of problem reports doesn't
correspond directly with the number of bugs in the system, it also tracks the
number of users of the system. I don't think anyone is really in a position
to directly evaluate the relative "bugginess" of various systems in an
objective way, but I think I would probably be right if I claimed that FreeBSD
has a lot greater installation diversity and end-user exposure than OpenBSD or
NetBSD, and this is certainly a contributing factor to our bug report
situation. Derived systems like PC-BSD have only increased that exposure,
especially in the desktop hardware space.
I know that Mark Linimon has done quite a bit of analysis of the state of the
PRs, especially as to which ones stay open vs. which ones get closed, and may
be able to offer some insight. I have a vague recollection that last time
around, he reported essentially linear growth in open kernel bug reports, and
essentially stable ports PRs, but I've not really seen stats on how bug
reports against the base system get closed. For example, I'm not sure we make
a "fixed" vs "closed" distinction, which we'd need in order to do a good
analysis.
FWIW, there are quite a few of us who are interested in improving the
daignosis of problems. My recent work involving DDB textdumps was entirely
about improving our level of automation for kernel crashes, which should allow
us to do a lot less hand-holding in gathering bug reports (and, ideally,
therefore improve our report handling rate). While there are social elements
at work here that aren't addressed by purely technical solutions, there is
also a lot of room for the development of technical solutions here as well.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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