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New entry about backporting fixes.

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Rob Landley 2006-08-16 22:13:56 +00:00
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docs/busybox.net/FAQ.html
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@ -24,6 +24,7 @@ have additions to this FAQ document, we would love to add them,
<h2>Troubleshooting</h2>
<ol>
<li><a href="#bugs">I think I found a bug in BusyBox! What should I do?!</a></li>
<li><a href="#backporting">I'm using an ancient version from the dawn of time and something's broken. Can you backport fixes for free?</a></li>
<li><a href="#init">Busybox init isn't working!</a></li>
<li><a href="#sed">I can't configure busybox on my system.</a></li>
<li><a href="#job_control">Why do I keep getting "sh: can't access tty; job control turned off" errors? Why doesn't Control-C work within my shell?</a></li>
@ -336,15 +337,66 @@ within each applet. More build coverage testing.</p></li>
</p>
<p>
The developers of BusyBox are busy people, and have only so much they can
keep in their brains at a time. As a result, bug reports and new feature
patches sometimes get lost when posted to the mailing list. To prevent
your bug report from getting lost, if you find a bug in BusyBox that isn't
immediately addressed, please use the <a
href="http://bugs.busybox.net/">BusyBox Bug and Patch Tracking System</a>
to submit a detailed explanation and we'll get to it as soon as we can.
Bug reports and new feature patches sometimes get lost when posted to the
mailing list, because the developers of BusyBox are busy people and have
only so much they can keep in their brains at a time. You can post a
polite reminder after 2-3 days without offending anybody. If that doesn't
result in a solution, please use the
<a href="http://bugs.busybox.net/">BusyBox Bug
and Patch Tracking System</a> to submit a detailed explanation and we'll
get to it as soon as we can.
</p>
<p>
Note that bugs entered into the bug system without being mentioned on the
mailing list first may languish there for months before anyone even notices
them. We generally go through the bug system when preparing for new
development releases, to see what fell through the cracks while we were
off writing new features. (It's a fast/unreliable vs slow/reliable thing.
Saves retransits, but the latency sucks.)
</p>
<hr />
<p></p>
<h2><a name="backporting">I'm using an ancient version from the dawn of time and something's broken. Can you backport fixes for free?</h2>
<p>Variants of this one get asked a lot.</p>
<p>The purpose of the BusyBox mailing list is to develop and improve BusyBox,
and we're happy to respond to our users' needs. But if you're coming to the
list for free tech support we're going to ask you to upgrade to a current
version before we try to diagnose your problem.</p>
<p>If you're building BusyBox 0.50 with uClibc 0.9.19 and gcc 0.9.26 there's a
fairly large chance that whatever problem you're seeing has already been fixed.
To get that fix, all you have to do is upgrade to a newer version. If you
don't at least _try_ that, you're wasting our time.</p>
<p>The volunteers are happy to fix any bugs you point out in the current
versions because doing so helps everybody and makes the project better. We
want to make the current version work for you. But diagnosing, debugging, and
backporting fixes to old versions isn't something we do for free, because it
doesn't help anybody but you. The cost of volunteer tech support is using a
reasonably current version of the project.</p>
<p>If you don't want to upgrade, you have the complete source code and thus
the ability to fix it yourself, or hire a consultant to do it for you. If you
got your version from a vendor who still supports the older version, they can
help you. But there are limits as to what the volunteers will feel obliged to
do for you.</p>
<p>As a rule of thumb, volunteers will generally answer polite questions about
a given version for about three years after its release before it's so old
we don't remember the answer off the top of our head. And if you want us to
put any _effort_ into tracking it down, we want you to put in a little effort
of your own by confirming it's still a problem with the current version. It's
also hard for us to fix a problem of yours if we can't reproduce it because
we don't have any systems running an environment that old.</p>
<p>A consultant will happily set up a special environment just to reproduce
your problem, and you can always ask on the list if any of the developers
have consulting rates.</p>
<hr />
<p>
<h2><a name="init">Busybox init isn't working!</a></h2>