Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir via Tech-talk" <[email protected]> · Wed, 11 Dec 2019 17:14:00 -0600

On 12/11, Mark Rivers wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> 
> Hmm, other minor developers like Redhat seem to do the same thing.
> 
> 
> https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.7_release_notes/known_issues

(Resending because the first copy of the above message I received did
not have Tech-Talk CC'd, so I did not reply with Tech-Talk CC'd.)

Hmm, I was unaware of such a document from Red Hat.  Thank you for
pointing that out!  I stand corrected.

Well, partially corrected. :-)  After a quick scan through the first
seven or so issues on that page, it seems like the things listed there
fall into one of three categories:

1. Red Hat won't fix.
2. Red Hat has fixed and released an update to a package to fix it.
3. Red Hat does not have a fix and is working on it.

I can see using a known-problems document for #1 and #3, but not for #2.
For example, in the #2 case of BZ#1631826, the bug status is "CLOSED
ERRATA" with a "Fixed In Version" field value of ipa-4.6.5-2.el7.  So,
Red Hat has released an updated package that fixes the problem.  They're
not sitting on a fix that they know fixes the problem, but not releasing
it.

That's the part I'm not too excited about with the known-problems page
concept for EPICS and related software: at least for EPICS, it seems to
just be a list of patches that fix problems.  Then I think to myself,
why don't they just make a patch release that includes the fix that they
already have?  Why do I have to download the tarball, and then manually
read the known-problems page, download all the patches that are linked
there, and apply them?  Why not just make a patch release so that I can
just download the latest patch release and know that I've got the latest
version?

Lewis

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System