[ltp] The fix is in -- kernel fix that is...

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 07:21:00AM +0000, Steven J. Owens wrote:
>      Don't mind the sarcasm.  As much as you're frustrated, so are the
> technically proficient people.  You're just receiving some spillover.
> If "regular people" cared enough, then the technically proficient
> people - especially the people who actually fix these problems - would
> have a lot more support (and pressure on some vendors who make life
> quite difficult for nonsensical reasons).
> 
>      I quite sympathize with you, re: release numbers. I was running
> Ubuntu 12.4 LTS until quite recently, for just such reasons. I
> upgraded to 13 a few weeks back, and now my laptop doesn't always
> resume.  It seems frustrating and you wonder why you bother, but part
> of that is due to human selective memory.  Linux works so well, so
> much of the time, that it's a bigger letdown when it fails.  \

Or you switch to a distribution which is much more aggressive about
updating to newer kernels, and/or much more aggressive upgrading to
the latest community distribution of Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Debian,
etc.

What?  You say you're running a business and you can't afford the risk
of using bleeding edge kernels?  That's when you have to pay $$$
support to distribution company.  There are real costs involved with
backporting patches to older kernels, since while *you* might consider
a patch a critical one to backport, for *other* enterprise customeres
it's a patch which might cause regressions on their systems.  So there
are huge costs involved when enterprise distro's have to test patches
to make sure they don't cause problems for any of their other paying
customers.

If you are using an enterprise distro, such as Ubuntu LTS, or RHEL,
but you're not paying the support costs, you're a free-rider.  So you
can report a problem to Ubuntu or Red Hat, and you can request that
they backport the feature, but since it costs them real money to
backport and QA a fix, if you're not paying them any more, why would
you expect that they would treat your request with anything other than
the lowest priority?

The frustration from the technically proficient people is that uppity
users are demanding that they provide free services for no cost.  It
may be that we'll backport fixes to the stable kernels, on a best
efforts basis, but then someone still have to build the stable kernels
and package them for Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc., and someone still has to
test and run quality assurance on the stable kernels.

Regards,

						- Ted