Need for malone to be adopted
by Mez on Feb.25, 2006, under Geeky, Linux
Ok, so not too long back a couple of us managed to thrash out a bug in katapult, and found out it was due to qt-immodule returning errorneous data. So – we fixed it in ubuntu – and sent the patch into debian.
Well now, it seems like katapult is hitting this problem in every single other Linux Distro, because people are starting to adopt qt-immodule.
I’ve just spent half an hour filing bugs in every major linux distro’s bugzillas regarding this issue. What an annoyance.
From what I’ve spoke with Mark about Malone (http://launchpad.net/malone/) – it seems that Malone would be the best thing since sliced bread for bug reporting. But only if everyone were to adopt it. I could file my bug in ubuntu – say “yep – it’s upstream too” and then say “oh, and it’s also in gentoo, Mandriva, RedHat, Suse etc etc … and when the devs from those distros come along and find the bug, they could easily see – “oh – it’s been fixed in ubuntu – lets grab the patch from there – and fix it in our distro”.
However, this isn’t the case at the moment, as the only people who really use malone to it’s full potential are ubuntu. And well – it’s no good just having us.
Please, anyone who is a developer out there – and has a bugtracker, consider using malone – it makes life so much easier for us people who have to work with so many bugzilla’s etc to get a problem in one place fixed everywhere.
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Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Malone is useful even if you have your own bug tracker
February 28th, 2006 on 7:28 pm[...] Martin Meredith blogs that it would be good for other distros also to adopt Malone. Most of the larger distros have established bugzilla’s or their own custom bug trackers, though, so we specifically designed Malone so that it can link to those external bug trackers rather than requiring them to adopt Malone. [...]
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February 25th, 2006 on 11:26 am
Untill it’s closed source I don’t think that anybody else would seriously look into adoption. I mean, red hat, the ones who are against using mono, won’t adopt this toy just to ease ubuntu’s life. And as for features – for me as a bug reporter bugzilla was so much more complete. And what about that ugly UI?
February 25th, 2006 on 1:45 pm
I have to agree with you that a tool like malone is one of the greatest things since sliced bread.
Having a central place where all bugs can posted no matter the distribution or the application is truly a revolutionary idea.
Of course, malone has still some bugs and annoyances, but that’s nothing that can’t be fixed.
The big problem with malone is that it’s not Open Source.
I’m having a hard time understanding why the open source community should use a closed source tool.
We have already seen what happens when an open source project uses a proprietary software.
You just have to remember when the linux kernel adopted bitkeeper.
I am a proud ubuntu user and I love the distrobution, but I still prefer posting bugs in the upstream than using malone for that exact reason.
I don’t think that using a proprietary solution will help open source.
February 25th, 2006 on 7:26 pm
sandis: I don’t believe it’s just easing ubuntu’s life – as I’ve made quite clear… the point behind malone is to ease everyone’s life
February 26th, 2006 on 12:34 am
I’m with the previous posts on this – until Malone is opensource and can metamoderate its own bugs I will have severe issues using it and will prefer going upstream directly.
February 26th, 2006 on 2:48 am
What about pushing the bugfix upstream instead of to Debian?
February 27th, 2006 on 11:56 am
Malone is not ready yet. In its current state, encouraging other distributions to use it is probably counter-productive (bad first impressions).
One cool thing coming soon is “bug watch” functions for Malone to track the status of bug reports in other bug trackers. Right now, you can take link all those bug reports you filed on qt-immodule in debbugs and the various Bugzillas, and link them to the same Malone bug report. Soon, Malone will start polling those bug trackers regularly to keep track of where the bug has and hasn’t been fixed. Then distributors will be able to save time by using Malone, since they can copy an important bugfix from whoever fixes a bug first — upstream, or any of the other distributions — instead of shipping with a bug that they didn’t realize was fixed in Red Hat or in Mandriva or in Yellow Dog or wherever months ago.
(Opinions are my own and not those of the Launchpad team as a whole, yada yada.)
February 28th, 2006 on 10:35 am
There is no way in hell anybody is going to adopt Malone until it is open sourced. If its not ready yet why do you want others to adopt it. If you release source code under a appropriate license more than just the Canonical people can help fix it, so dont use that as a excuse. There is no such thing as bad impressions due to early release in Free software.