blog/data/2010-06-01-bad-bug-handling.txt

   1 Title: KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?
   2 Tags: english, debian, debian edu
   3 Date: 2010-06-01 17:05
   4
   5 <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
   6 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used.  The problem seem to
   7 be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to initialize, and
   8 this duration is longer than kdm is configured to wait.</p>
   9
  10 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
  11 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
  12 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
  13 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
  14 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
  15 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
  16
  17 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
  18 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
  19 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
  20 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
  21 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver start faster, and
  22 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
  23 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
  24 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
  25
  26 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>