I wouldn't call this a "fail"
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| caitlyn Nov 17, 2009 11:05 AM EDT |
I know I'm arguing semantics here but I wouldn't call this a "fail". It's a change that makes a lot of sense, IMHO. Nowadays most systems have support for multiple removable storage media and often more than one slot for USB devices or digital media. It's pretty common for me to have both a USB stick and an SD card plugged into my netbook. The old way of doing things assigned /media/disk to the first device inserted and /media/disk-1 to the second so the mount point for a given device was not consistent at all. With the change in Karmic the device names are 100% consistent. I can easily write a script to determine if a given device is present and, if it is, to do a backup that is appropriate to how I use the device. I can easily write code that will work regardless of which media is or is not present and not worry about the system using different mount points. To me this is enhanced functionality that is part of Linux adapting to newer technologies and the realities of modern systems without breaking support for older, legacy hardware. Yes, it could cause code which depended on the old methodology of assigning mount points to fail. No doubt about that. It isn't a failure in Ubuntu and, as Steven correctly points out, it can be worked around if need be. To me a "Karmic fail" is a bug: something that's broken that wasn't broken before. |
| montezuma Nov 17, 2009 11:41 AM EDT |
I agree with Caitlyn:
Bug=Fail (and Ubuntu has it's fair share of these)
System change=Annoyance and in the latter case the advantage of linux is customizability so wearing annoyances comes with the territory. The only thing that I don't like is that Ubuntu developers are slow to properly document all the under the hood stuff they are doing which makes it hard for the ordinary user to customize. Particularly bad in that area imo is upstart, udev and hal. All very nice to have flexibility but PLEASE document it. |
| tuxchick Nov 17, 2009 11:42 AM EDT |
The fail is first not documenting this in the release notes, and the second fail is hiding the release notes. I had to use search to find them. But you can sure find lots of marketing junk disguised as documentation easily. |
| caitlyn Nov 17, 2009 11:54 AM EDT |
montezuma & tuxchick: I agree with both of you. This should have been in the release notes and should be well documented. The "annoyance" part is true of most changes until you adjust to them. The added functionality, in this case, is worth the minor annoyance. I actually wish more distros would do the same. |
| flufferbeer Nov 17, 2009 12:02 PM EDT |
@montezuma and tuxchick Seems to me that this is all part of the ongoing battle between Ubuntu-developers putting out cutting-edge technology + great performance vs. having bug-free stability, customizability and clear documentation for us end-users. Ubuntu Karmic works absolutely fantastically (I recommend it), yet I can still see your points. Don't worry, Ubuntu'll get to where we all want it to be.... sometime :) 2c |
| Steven_Rosenber Nov 17, 2009 12:29 PM EDT |
When all my backup scripts error out and I have to take time out from the rest of my work to rewrite them, it's a problem. As I say in the entry, I seen the wisdom of a unique UUID-based name for each drive, but discovering the change through broken scripts is just not the nicest way the Ubuntu developers could have spread the news. To me this is more important than telling me about Ubuntu One or kernel mode setting (the former I have used and wonder if and when it'll be useful, the latter I had to turn off in order to have the display work at all). |
| tuxchick Nov 17, 2009 12:29 PM EDT |
The more I use computers the more hard-core I'm getting on making good documentation a priority. I think Linux and FOSS are well beyond so-called "community documentation" and overdue for some real professionalism. What good is writing great code if nobody knows how to use it? It's absurd. Telling users to rely on Google is ridiculous. I think Google is the worst thing to happen to software documentation because it makes it too easy to slough off the responsibility for writing good docs. Programmers like to complain about "I hate writing docs, and anyway I am a leet coder and lesser humans can handle documentation." Well I hate wasting hours and days trying to figure out basic functionality and troubleshooting. Documentation is part and parcel of coding. At the very least a thorough man page makes it possible for other people to build on them and write more detailed, friendlier howtos. This past week has made me especially fed up. I had a problem with converting DVI to PDF in Kile, dvpdfm fails and exits with an 'error 1'. Well WTF is error 1? The man page does not say. The logfile says nothing. Shame on man page authors who do not describe error messages. Google does not say. Nobody says. I wasted many hours on this. My final solution? Give up and try it on a different distro. How the hell many different distros do I need to keep on standby? I had several other problems of the really lame variety that pretty much shot my whole week down in flames. In anticipation of the inevitable dismissals: 1. I actively support FOSS in several ways: financially, writing howtos and help, reporting bugs (for my own amusment, it's not like they get fixed), mentoring noobs, and doing migrations 2. So don't tell me that devs' lack of thoroughness and professionalism is the user's fault. |
| caitlyn Nov 17, 2009 12:33 PM EDT |
tuxchick: You won't get any dismissals or arguments from me, Well said. |
| montezuma Nov 17, 2009 12:43 PM EDT |
+1 from me as well TC. Lack of documentation has been a beef of mine for years. Not having it is a real time waster for ordinary users. I don't see why Canonical who loudly proclaim their commitment to end user experience don't do something serious about this. They have relied on community wikis and user forums to cover them for too long and this has been a passable solution but right now that documentation is imo a shambles. A lot of it is outdated, fuzzy and incomplete. /rant |
| tuxchick Nov 17, 2009 12:48 PM EDT |
One more rant: look how I fell into the trap of "the lowly end user must prove worthiness!" Geez. No, they don't. |
| jdixon Nov 17, 2009 1:07 PM EDT |
> Lack of documentation has been a beef of mine for years. Back in the day, when they actually sold Linux to real people rather than just the fortune 500, Red Hat's documentation was excellent. I haven't seen an equivalent since. :( |
| ABCC Nov 17, 2009 1:40 PM EDT |
I've noticed a shake up in this area as well. The command line tool 'vol_id' has gone missing, having been replaced by one called blkid. Not a bad change imho as I didn't have anything relying on it. I needed google to figure out the change, from that output I'd say Steven isn't the only one suffering this sort of problems. |
| gus3 Nov 17, 2009 2:28 PM EDT |
+1 tc. "Error 1" sounds a lot like the deadly "MALFUNCTION 5" from the Therac-25 fiasco. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25#Root_causes |
| caitlyn Nov 17, 2009 6:24 PM EDT |
Yep, had the change in how removable media is mounted been in the release announcement and well documented Steven would have known up front and could have modified his scripts before upgrading. I agree that the lack of adequate documentation, not the actual code change, is the real culprit here and is a genuine "fail" to use Steven's terminology. Red Hat still has excellent docs and they are freely available online. You could always run Scientific Linux or CentOS, both free Red Hat clones, and use that documentation. It seems Oracle Linux (formerly Unbreakable Linux), another Red Hat clone, is also freely downloadable now. I haven't checked it out to see if it contains an objectionable license, something I wouldn't put past Oracle. Vector Linux has sporadically good documentation. It gets outdated and for some time things go downhill and then someone realizes it needs to be redone and it's good again. I think a lot of distros go through that sort of thing. Documentation takes a back seat to coding and, as tuxchick says, it should be integral to the coding process. Language issues also sometimes crop up. I get the idea that Pardus is well documented if you read Turkish. When I had an installation issue with my netbook I not only got an answer in the forum but someone translated the Turkish wiki page to English. If it had been there in English in the first place I wouldn't have had the problem. Having said that, wiki and forum searches can be a painful way to find the info you need. It's scattershot and sometimes you have to go through several pages. My openSUSE install was made possible by an outdated page for version 10.3. I was able to figure out what was out of date (a mirror address) and work from there. Not good, is it? Novell can and should do better. They certainly have the resources. Anyway, I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant... |
| montezuma Nov 17, 2009 7:07 PM EDT |
I think we are seeing rants because lack of documentation equals intense frustration for end users. Moreover if you make money by selling support (as Canonical does) there is actually an incentive not to try hard in this area. Kudos to Red Hat for not being cynical about this. |
| moopst Nov 17, 2009 7:53 PM EDT |
I would think if Canonical sells support it would be in their interest to get the documentation right in the first place. Help the customer self support most issues and use the call center for the really tough issues. |
| Steven_Rosenber Nov 17, 2009 11:01 PM EDT |
One of the reasons to use Ubuntu or Red Hat/CentOS is that whatever the quality of the official documentation, when one is relying on Google or forums, there's a lot more material out there from which to find a solution to whatever problems you might encounter. Half of my blog entries are pretty much loosely written documentation ... And could I have ever figured out rsync without tuxchick? It would've taken a lot longer, that's for sure. |
| montezuma Nov 17, 2009 11:36 PM EDT |
Some of the problems have occurred because they have changed a lot of fairly basic system things in the past two years. In particular upstart, hal, dbus and udev all interact in a fairly mysterious fashion. Documentation of that "ecosystem" is pretty thin on the ground. I have also had problems with xorg. In previous years this was primarily controlled by xorg.conf but that was regarded by devs as too unfriendly so they automated everything and omitted to tell us how they did it. When a video driver fails now you are in bad shape. Finally I was looking to sort out some audio problems recently and was amazed at the spiderweb that has developed there. Pulseaudio on top of alsa and both very complex and (this is getting repetitive!) badly documented makes sorting things out very hit and miss.... I could go on but won't... |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 18, 2009 4:32 AM EDT |
Quoting:Moreover if you make money by selling support (as Canonical does) there is actually an incentive not to try hard in this area. Nonsense. See also the other forum thread about support contracts. Canonical's support contracts are fixed-fee. The more their customers can do themselves (i.e. the better the docs and the fewer bugs) the more money Canonical will make. Canonical sells support to companies. They are not going to drop their support contracts just because the documentation is better or because there are fewer bugs. Companies want the insurance that if something goes wrong, it will be fixed. Swiftly. Like Hans said in the other thread, fixed-fee support is like insurance. |
| montezuma Nov 18, 2009 11:08 PM EDT |
Sander,
I take your point regarding fixed fee corporate clients however I just bought a home PC from Zareason and it said in the blurb that I received that there were many support options (which included the wikis, irc and usual docs plus the forum) and ended with this: "If you would like to pay for the absolute best tech support, you can purchase help from Canonical, the official support company for Ubuntu" This blurb from it's wording is aimed squarely at regular consumers not corporate clients as does the actual product itself: http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=528&o... "The Starter service enables a new Ubuntu user to explore and use the environment with confidence, safe in the knowledge that the Canonical team is available to help." Given the frustration level I have seen often on the forums I am sure some folks who cannot find their way around might either go back to Windows or buy this support contract for peace of mind. It isn't very expensive after all. I will concede that I am putting 2 and 2 together on this however I would contend that there is a potential conflict of interest here. Indeed the fact that Red Hat has good documentation and relies almost completely on corporate clients would seem to prove your point on the corporate side of things but for the individual user that Ubuntu has claimed to be targeting, the reverse is possibly true. |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 19, 2009 3:42 AM EDT |
@montezuma: I wonder if those end-user desktop support actually is a money maker for Canonical. The server/business licenses are over 10 times as expensive. I also hardly see the starter service advertised, as opposed to the business services which are well advertised. My gut feeling is that Canonical offers the starter support to fill a niche and offer piece of mind. Not as a money maker. I don't think the added revenue from a couple of starter support packages outweigh the loss on business support due to lack of documentation. |
| montezuma Nov 19, 2009 9:21 AM EDT |
Sander,
You would have to ask Ubuntu that question. I would not automatically assume that enduser contracts as opposed to corporate contracts are trivial. Ubuntu is by far the most popular desktop distro and they have had a relationship for some time with Dell
http://www.workswithu.com/2009/09/25/canonicalubuntu-ceo-mar... Red Hat has the corporate market pretty much sown up. Following your logic, if Ubuntu was serious about corporate support they would offer good documentation like Red Hat. |
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