Any News on cut-and-paste bug?

John G. Heim jheim at math.wisc.edu
Wed May 1 11:42:39 EDT 2013



On 05/01/13 08:50, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> John G. Heim, le Wed 01 May 2013 08:45:54 -0500, a écrit :
>> A big part of the problem is that even if someone is willing to take on
>> writing fixes for speakup, the kernel people won't cooperate. I tried to get
>> some help/advice from the linux kernel  list on implementing the bug fix I
>> had for serial synths. Their advice -- start over.
>
> Which isn't really not cooperating. The current code will keep having
> such kind of issues until it gets rewritten a more integrated way.

Well, the details of this particular bug are significant. The problem 
was that the speakup code was erroring out on what I believe was a 
totally meaningless error code. All I did was change the code to print a 
warning and keep going.

If you are a programmer, you may be saying to yourself, "Well, that's 
not a good way to solve a problem." But I am about as sure as I can be 
that the function call that returned the error code did nothing. The 
function was part of the kernel code, not speakup. So I went on the 
kernel list to ask what the function was supposed to do,   was it 
necessary to call it at all,  and how to call it correctly.

All I wanted to do was get rid of what I suspected was a call to a 
function that apparently did nothing and the subsequent erroring out. 
But nobody seemed to know what the function did or if they did, they 
weren't sharing. They did, however, take the time to criticize the 
speakup code itself.

So I was like, "Come on, people. Can't we just focus on this one 
problem? It seems like a small fix for a huge problem. I mean, I cannot 
use my hardware speech synth without patching the kernel code. This 
could cost me my job. It could cost a lot of blind systems admins their 
jobs."

No love.


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