The saga continues with Red Hat bug #448014 and the flame war shows no sign of stopping. It has now been over two months and the only fix for the crippling LDAP regression in the 5.2 release has come from the CentOS dev team. To make matters worse, the Red Hat engineers have begun telling the bug subscribers that if they want help they have to contact Red Hat with a support contract, since "bugzilla is not an official support tool." Great! Why bother even having it then if it does no good to the user community and is "an internal development system." Why really bothers me is the fact that people with support contracts have begun to post that they are not seeing any solutions and are relying on the bugzilla ticket as a means of hope. Good luck, because it doesn't look like they'll be getting any soon. Far from being helpful, the Red Hat engineers have done nothing but use the support contract as a shield whenever someone asks why this crippling issue hasn't been fixed yet.

At this point the ticket has just gotten completely out of hand, so I submitted it with this short story over at slashdot.org. Let's see if it actually get's picked up:

Over at this Bugzilla ticket, an extremely upset Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 user community has been waging battle for over two months with regards to what should have been a painless update. With the RHEL 5.2 maintenance release, a major regression in code was let loose, effectively crippling any and all systems that utilize LDAP. What then should have been a quick bug fix became even more complicated as users were made aware that this regression was known to Red Hat before the 5.2 release. Attempting to ease the pain, the CentOS development team immediately released a fix and a package update, no support contract required, yet Red Hat offered no solution. As the weeks moved on, Red Hat engineers did little to help the situation, even falling back on their support contracts as defense, yet customers actually paying for them were hardly amused. The open bug ticket quickly degenerated into a flame war between Red Hat engineers and the countless number of system administrators trying to cope with such a major blocker. As many of the ticket subscribers have pointed out, what is the point of paying for a hefty support contract when the open source community responds with a faster and more functional solution?

 Also submitted over at digg.