On 26/12/13 19:14, Gabor Toth wrote:
> I would question though if bluetooth would be the most major issue.
Obviously not the most major issue in Ubuntu. There are bigger issues,
like those that completely freeze the whole system obliging you to do a
hard reboot and loose all unsaved data, or sudden xorg crashes/logouts
(which also wipe out all your unsaved data) or not being able to
hibernate (and if you do, take the risk you may not be able to resume).
But bluetooth and wifi connectivity (oh!! and mobile broadband! what a
nightmare too) are the kind of things that one expects to be completely
painless, as you won't easily find a smartphone that has the smallest
wifi/bluetooth issue, so in comparison it's a little embarassing and
irritating to find yourself unable to use bluetooth on a laptop.
> I personally did not have much problem with that for what
> I was using it
> for - sending music over to a bluetooth device. Worked with a
> few click
> no manual setting or scripting at all.
I personally use it mainly for transferring files (primarily pictures)
from my android smartphone to the computer (which is only a small
fraction of its uses, I realise), and it also used to work without and
manual setting or scripting at all... not even a click! (except clicking
on "OK" when you had received a file), on previous versions of Ubuntu.
It occasionally would start to systematically reject all transfers,
which used to be fixed by turning bluetooth off and on. Now on 13.04 and
on my new computer, sending a file from the phone is completely
impossible, so I've started browsing files on the phone from the
computer, which works like 15% of the times.
> I do think that a team to look into bluetooth would be helpful.
> However,
as there are few people who can work on sections such as the drivers
for, e.g. nvidia, In the mean time, go complain to companies who do not
have linux drivers for their hardware :)
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm under the impression everybody here is
assuming all or most bluetooth issues are related to drivers. The fact
is most of the bug reports have not even been looked at, and I suspect a
few of them are not even related to drivers, being either in the
tray-icon applet or in Nautilus. In many cases the hcidump is completely
empty while experiencing the issue.
By the way, I got the impression there is a kind of more general issue
in the way bugs are managed, please take it into consideration, I may be
completely mistaken of course. It looks to me like there's a gap that
needs to be filled between users reporting bugs and developers working
on fixing triaged and confirmed bugs.
That is, the typical lifecycle of a lot of bug reports (of course I see
this mainly on bugs I report myself, so I don't claim this is
statistically significant) is:
- a user files a bug report
- then either:
-- A: nobody (capable of fixing, investigating, triaging or digging into
it) even looks at it until it's confirmed, which may be in ages or just
never
or
-- B: - somebody (or a bot) asks for more infomration, like "please test
upstream kernels", or whatever.
- The OP simply can't, or doesn't want to, or hasn't the skills
or the time to, or just WON'T, do that. Most of the time the required
work of collecting additional information must be done by somebody with
more experience and knowledge than you can expect by the original reporter.
- so the bug expires.
Most of the bugs I report end like that, and many that I didn't report
myself but I found out describing the issues I was experimenting, had
the exact same fate.
If the strategy used to tackle bugs is:
- developers only look at/for confirmed, perfectly triaged bug reports
with already enough information to start fixing them
- expect users who encounter the issues to file complete, perfect,
already workable bug reports
- then have some people dedicated to testing who, of course, will file
complete, perfect, already workable bug reports (and expect this to be
enough to find and report most relevant issues)
then sorry but that's a wrong strategy and is not going to work. Those
trained people dedicated to testing will only find a ridiculously small
percentage of bugs affecting end users (I'm not saying there's anything
wrong in that, that's certainly a necessary and invaluable work).
But bug reports filed by end users, finding bugs that have eluded
"dedicated" testing, will either starve or expire.
Either developers who work at fixing bugs or testers who usually do
thorough testing, should also look at unconfirmed, need-info, etc. bug
reports where the OP hasn't provided (and will never provide) all the
needed information, because often the bug report, whether or not the
issue is easily reproducible, does contain enough information for
somebody to investigate and test it further and take it to the next step.
As a user, like me, who uses some amazing software that has been created
by the huge effort of thousands of generous people, when I find an issue
and take the time to report it, of course I don't feel like I'm doing
much to help. I do see I'm doing very, very little. But it's just as
much as I can do and it is frustrating to see that even that "very
little" gets wasted and turns into nothing when it could actually be used.
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