how do we poke devs on long-opened bugs?

[Brunellus]

My local LUG mailing list has been exercised lately over this bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...xorg/+bug/9068

and as the Ubuntu kid I've just caught some heat from a user who complains that without serial mouse support, he has no X.

This isn't your average blinking 12 user, mind you, but it did get me thinking: this bug has been open for over two years, with no real resolution, and reports of things working properly in Knoppix. How can we nudge the developers to fix this bug? Is there some sort of "ancient bug cleanup team?"

[bonzodog]

I would imagine you would need to post to one of the mailing lists about it, though I am not sure which one.

[salsafyren]

Good question.

I think the devs just want to close such bugs, because they do not have the manpower to fix them.

It could be nice if Ubuntu could make updates for old releases but then how would they have time to develop the new release?

I think always focusing on the new releases will hurt Ubuntu in the long run (lower quality releases) but it will advance the OS faster.

Do we need more developers?

[Brunellus]

Good question.

I think the devs just want to close such bugs, because they do not have the manpower to fix them.

It could be nice if Ubuntu could make updates for old releases but then how would they have time to develop the new release?

I think always focusing on the new releases will hurt Ubuntu in the long run (lower quality releases) but it will advance the OS faster.

Do we need more developers?

the bug remains open because it is not fixed in subsequent releases--if you read the comments on the bug, it remains open in Feisty.

[koenn]

The bug will cease to be a bug the moment serial mice become obsolete. Give it another year or so

And I suppose that goes for lots of not-so-critical bugs : given enough time, they'll cease to be a problem

[Brunellus]

The bug will cease to be a bug the moment serial mice become obsolete. Give it another year or so

And I suppose that goes for lots of not-so-critical bugs : given enough time, they'll cease to be a problem

the fix is already in Knoppix, apparently. That's what makes it irritating; there's no developer statement as to *why* they can't or won't fix it--they just haven't gotten around to it.

[koenn]

Well, maybe the think it's just not worth the trouble, since serial mice are obsolete - or so they think.

I wonder how hard this would actualmly be - what if one could just check how knoppix handlles it (these guys are really good with hardware detection), make a patch, and go "here's a fix for that bug, could you add it to the package ?"
But I wouldn't know where to start looking ...

[salsafyren]

Even though the bug has a patch attached, it does not necessarily mean that the devs will fix it.

If they have other priorities, it would be nice to know so.

[az]

the fix is already in Knoppix, apparently. That's what makes it irritating; there's no developer statement as to *why* they can't or won't fix it--they just haven't gotten around to it.

It would seem to me that this is an upstream Xorg problem. There are only a handful of developers that work on Ubuntu. Most of the work is done by upstream.

What version of Knoppix was used by the person who left that comment? Does knoppix still use a 2.4 kernel and Xfree86? I am not up on the latest version, but it still did last year!

That makes it a completely different operating system. And I would be interested in knowing if the most current version of Knoppix has a working serial mouse with Xorg.

[koenn]

It would seem to me that this is an upstream Xorg problem.

Don't think so. I had a look at mdetect - the debian tool to detect mice ; I assume Ubuntu uses it too and probably Knoppix as well althoug they've been know to borrow hardware detection tools from RedHat as well.

mdetect can produce "output appropriate for XFree86 4.x configuration" and returns error codes such as 0 (success), 1 (error occurred), 2 (no mouse found) so presumably the output is captured and written to xorg.conf. It should be fairly easy to check for errorcode '2' and start a small "assumeSerialMouseAndDealWithIt" routine
I suppose that sort of stuff is at installer level, so nothing to do with Xorg. Bedides, the comments in the bug report indicate that IF a serial mouse is detected, X is configured accordingly and stuff works. Detecting serial mice is the actual hard part, not dealing with 'no mouse found' is the bug.