Tracking Bugs in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

I’ve begun testing Hardy Heron and I’ve already found some bugs. So in the interest of getting the best OS possible I’m going to try and report all bugs I find and track their status prior to the final release. I’m sure I’ll make updates to this post as I go.

Critical Bugs

• sudo shouldn’t ABSOLUTELY NEED to look up the host it’s running on
  • If not fixed this bug could break a lot of systems when they are upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04. When using sudo broken systems will see the error message “sudo: unable to resolve host”.
  • This has supposedly been fixed as of May 5, 2008.
• xen guest kernel bug
  • I won’t be upgrading any Xen DomU’s to Hardy until this is resolved. For more details check out duplicate networking not working.
  • This may be fixed as of May 26, 2008.
• tc Segmentation fault on amd64 Xen dom0
  • A GNU/Linux OS really can’t ship with a broken tc without taking flak. This is a necessary element for servers and increasingly used on desktops as well.
  • Fixed as of 4/8/2008.
• Change in cut behavior breaks scripts (coreutils)
  Change in cut behavior breaks scripts (xen-common)
  • This is not being fixed in coreutils.
• puppet init.d script is broken
  • I think any broken init.d script is probably a critical problem.

Important Bugs

• Gaim doesn’t include SILC support
  • I consider this important as the bug report is 2 years old and the fix would take less than a minute. If the people on Ubuntu can’t get this right then that’s just pathetic.
• Request for silc-toolkit Inclusion in Main
  • In order for the less than 1 minute fix to enable SILC support in Pidgin the silc-toolkit package needs to be accepted in main. Of course, this was also requested some time ago to no avail.
• Ubuntu should activate the IPv6 privacy extension by default
  • This is critical because it has security implications. However, this is not being fixed for Hardy.
• missing dependency: python-xml (xen-3.1)
  missing dependency: python-xml (xen-3.2)
• Puppet client 0.24.2 and later does not work with puppet server 0.24.1 and earlier

Normal Bugs

• swfdec-mozilla uses 100% CPU
• errors in xendomains init script
• ip_always_defrag is invalid
• sysctl.conf, net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding, race condition?
• monsterz game does not start
• [FTBFS] silky (0.5.4-0.1) fails to build in gutsy
  • Fixed as of 4/7/2008.
• CC-by-sa reported as non-free

ubuntu-minimal

At this point none of my servers have the ubuntu-minimal package installed due to dependency conflicts. I’m satisfied with this solution. However, if ubuntu-minimal is something that the Ubuntu devs think should be on servers then these need to be resolved:

• ubuntu-minimal should support recommends
• wireless-tools,wpasupplicant in -minimal
• ubuntu-minimal has weird dependencies
• ntpdate in -minimal should have an alternative

Other bugs to report/investigate

Sometimes wading into the existing bug reports has been an exhausting process. There are bugs marked as duplicates that aren’t, and some that aren’t marked that should be. There are issues which are marked fixed, and may have been, but with similar symptoms continuing. These are cases that I have not investigated to the degree I would have liked but recognize that I have had problems under Ubuntu 7.10.

• LVM crashes - I’ve had numerous crashes when using LVM snapshots, particularly in conjunction with Xen.
• K3B issues - I’ve had numerous issues with K3B that I wanted to help report but found the existing bug listings to be chaotic.
• MD/RAID boot issues - I’ve experienced the reported race conditions which cause an array to fail to be initialized early enough for the system to boot properly. I find this happens perhaps 1 in 5 boots or so on a production server.
• Use of libpam-unix2 (blowfish passwords) prevents the use of the Linux recovery mode with a root password.

More talk about Hardy Heron Bugs

• What’s Been Bugging you in Ubuntu 8.04?
• Is GDM hanging for you?
• Dapper To Hardy Direct Server Upgrade Works!
• FOSStration
• Hammering on the Heron
• Turning back to the dark side of the “force”