fragility

Stupid assholes ! That’s all i can say right now to all those talking sh*t about Ubuntu.

Everywhere i see blogposts, or reviews, or whatever (and even Ubuntu developers are noticing this) which talk about trouble upgrading to Edgy Eft or some other related Edgy Eft stuff. I mean…has everyone been deaf dumb and blind for the past six months ? Haven’t you bunch of assholes read that Edgy’s purpose was a bit different from Dapper’s one ? I won’t try to explain it all over again, you can read it for yourself on the annoucement:

And here's why. Edgy is all about cutting edge, perhaps bleeding edge,
brand new code and infrastructure. It will be the right time to bring in
some seriously interesting but definitely edgy new technologies which
lay the groundwork for the next wave of Ubuntu development.

And there’s more:

We can afford to take some risks with Dapper+1, because Dapper has turned
out so well. We have a great answer for people who need super-solid
and super-predictable results: Dapper is still fresh, will continue to work
on modern hardware for some time, and has plenty of legs in its support
cycle left to run.

I guess i won’t have to say much more, do i ? They have warned everyone they would be taking risks with this release, so expect problems.

Ok, so you might say “But this is Ubuntu ! It should have no problems at all ! It should work flawlessly.” No it shouldn’t. They might have a wealthy benefactor leading them but they don’t have unlimited resources, and they surely can’t afford to have all their releases as polished as Dapper Drake. A six month release cycle gives them the opportunity to experiment while still having a nice up to date release for those who demand stability.

They have said this before, they have warned everyone. And everyone has ignored them, and now every zealot is coming out to say “oooohhh…see…Ubuntu isn’t so good after all”.

We (Ubuntu fans) shouldn’t even care at all, but the truth is that these misleading reviews and criticism does nothing good for those new users who want to enter the Linux world, and does nothing good for the fame of open source software when compared to proprietary software. As long as stupid zealots keep doing this kind of stuff, proprietary software companies still have a weapon to fight and criticize open source. And this is a weapon we created. Think about that.

One thing i tought i wouldn’t do for a long time after i installed Ubuntu Breezy Badger last November or so, was a fresh install. After i realized i loved Ubuntu and that i wouldn’t keep it (yay no more distro hopping), i tought reinstalling would be a word to forget for a long time. Well that isn’t the case.

When dapper was almost out, i decided to go “unstable”, and i upgraded to Dapper Drake. This was in last April, right when they decided that Dapper’s release would be postponed by 6 weeks. It behaved fairly well for an unstable branch, but it left it’s marks. Somewhere along the way, something went wrong, very wrong.

One day, i found myself having some files replaced by strange symlinks, and i still found them today. /usr/bin/java was symlinked to some man page ! And like this one, i had many other important files symlinked to something that had nothing to do with it, like /etc/apache/httpd.conf symlinked to some binary file. I found so many already that i can’t remember them all. And there’s probably something else that went wrong, because once in a while i found some weird behaviors here and there.

One problem i had during Dapper unstable was with my Epson CX3200 not printing anything. “This will be solved by dapper’s release”, i tought. No way. There was a bug report about it, i confirmed it…and it only received confirmed status until very recently. I know, there are a lot of bug reports, and developers have limited time and resources, but this one was fairly simple, and the developer looked like he was paying some attention to it when it was first reported.

Well they are working out to get it solved now (i can’t try it because i don’t have the printer with me at the moment, and i’ll only have contact with it in September), and one of the conclusions they have reached is this:

So it appears to me there is a bug in the install script for gs-esp which does not install pstoraster.conv if the package is already configured even when the file is missing therefore only affecting upgraded systems and not newly installed systems.

If this happened, lots of other things might have happened that might have screwed my installation.

Now the big question is: fom what i can tell from the bug report, this happened to systems that were upgraded while dapper was unstable. Do systems that have been upgraded when dapper was already stable suffer from the same problem ?

For the sake of Ubuntu, let’s just hope not.