Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Michael Davidsaver via Tech-talk <[email protected]> · Wed, 11 Dec 2019 14:12:18 -0800

On 12/11/19 9:55 AM, Johnson, Andrew N. via Tech-talk wrote:
> On 12/11/19 11:01 AM, J. Lewis Muir via Tech-talk wrote:
>> On 12/11, Benjamin Franksen via Tech-talk wrote:
>>> (I just received the third bug report and the second fix for this
>>> problem. Apparently a lot of people use that platform for development
>>> nowadays and nobody looks at the "known problems" page in the docs...).
>> Yes, that's because the "known problems" page concept is weird, IMO.
>> EPICS does it too, and I've complained about that previously.  People
>> expect that if you know about a problem, you will fix it and make a new
>> patch release.
> The EPICS core developers don't maintain Known Problems pages of Base releases any more, although some sites would prefer that we did. The idea of them was to provide patches that sites could apply to existing installations instead of their having to install a complete new version with an updated version number and then have to reinstall (or at least re-configure and build) everything downstream of Base. Unless you have an automated configure+build system like Sumo the latter can take a lot more effort.
> 
> Mark Rivers pointed out that Red Hat do provide a Known Issues page, but I think that's just for the things they know about at release-time; I don't think they update those as new issues are discovered after the release, which is what I used to do for Base.

As one person who has been pushing against the "known problems" page, I should say something.

A known problems page doesn't take the place of patch releases.  It doesn't take
the place of VCS commit messages.  And it (should) necessitate additional testing to make
sure the net number of bugs has actually been reduced.  All I see only extra (unfunded) time,
something that Andrew, Ralph, and myself do not have in abundance.  I would rather see that
time spend on overheads which can't be avoided, or... maybe even some development.

Of course, there is no reason why the work of maintaining a known problems page has
to be done by Andrew.  Anyone can occasionally look through the recent VCS history
for bug fixes.  I did this while at NSLS2 for the debian packaging, also found it
a good learning experience.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System