Much obliged for the insight. I think I understand now the point that
Steve was trying to get at. If I understood correctly, Debian's role in
package maintenance is the packaging; the actual coding (and related
policies) are handled farther upstream.
All the same, I still struggle to understand how it's possible that
F/OSS has gone this long without a coherent approach to logging and
diagnosing problems. You make a doctor's job awfully difficult when you
only have vague symptoms which could refer to any number of ailments of
varying severity. The doctor, in this case, are the poor sods who've
agreed to manage the package.
It may not be Debian's policy to tell a programmer how to write
software, but surely a policy on generating useful troubleshooting
output is consistent with a goal of producing a stable operating system
and, therefore, an area where Debian can lead.
I recommended to the Debian policy people (who promptly ignored the
idea) that packages should produce time-stamped logs. I specifically
mentioned .xsession-errors which isn't time-stamped and the response was
that the output was part of an error stream and therefore impossible to
time stamp. Seriously? Java and C++ are the only languages capable of
catch (exception e) {
logfile.writeln( time() + e );
}
(yes, I know it's butchered C++/Java but you get the idea)
This idea alone could cut bug reports in half and make them twice as
useful! Instead of saying "attach Xorg.log" you could say "attach the
messages from Xorg.log which occurred 5 minutes before/after X went
blank." Yes, I know that Xorg is in the process of time-stamping their
logs, but the point is that there are still many other packages that
have no intention of switching.
Again, I appreciate the feedback. I'm a lot less frustrated that we're
talking about it. I have hope that some good idea or initiative will
come of this.
Borden
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