VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 10 2006 - 12:45:19 CST

Bogdan,
  Just to clarify, believe me, I _always_ report these bugs upstream,
but it sometimes takes months for the patches to become available, often
as long as half of the life cycle of a particular VMD binary release, way
too long for me to "just wait" for the patch to become available in the
main release. Often by the time the patch becomes available in the package
in question, there's a new bug to fix that didn't exist before, so it becomes
a neverending cycle. Some packages are better about this than others.
As you can imagine, I prefer to spend my time fixing VMD rather than haggling
with developers of video drivers, scripting languages, etc, so there's a limit
to how much time I can spend on these other things. I think you'd be
frightened to learn how many hours of my time it often takes to get these
things taken care of by these other developers. Anyway, suffice it to say
that I definitely report bugs upstream, but that this by itself is often
insufficient. I'll save the horror stories for another day and most likely
in private email.

  John

> > Regarding source RPMs. One of the problems I'd have in doing something
> > that automated is that I've had to manually patch various bugs in FLTK,
> > Tcl, Tk, Python, etc so that they build correctly on some of the target
> > platforms.
>
> Indeed, this is a problem. The standard answer that would come from
> the Fedora community for example would be to mention these bugs
> upstream (in this examples, to the developers of FLTK, Tcl, etc.) so
> that the next release from them would include the fix; this release
> could be made a prerequisite for building/installing. Not mentioning
> it upstream greatly reduces the chances of ever seeing it fixed and
> creates a burden for long term maintenance. For the slower moving
> enterprise distros, it helps to both have an upstream fix and file a
> bug in the distro's bug database; the distro makers are usually quite
> sensitive to ISV reports (you being an ISV in this respect) and there
> is a reasonably good chance of having a fix in the next update,
> service pack or whatever it is called. 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078