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, bootsystem
   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 is handled.  The
   7 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
   8 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
   9 wait.</p>
  10
  11 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
  12 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
  13 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
  14 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
  15 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
  16 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
  17
  18 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
  19 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
  20 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
  21 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
  22 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
  23 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
  24 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
  25 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
  26
  27 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>