[CentOS] Bug Policy [was Re: Does sprof work on CentOS5?]

[Hywel Richards]

Hywel Richards wrote:
> No matter how I try, I can't seem to get a library profile from sprof 
> on CentOS5.
>
> Does anyone know if sprof actually works on CentOS5? I'd be very 
> interested to hear if anyone is using it successfully.
>
> At the moment I'm trying something like this to get the dump:
>
>    LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. LD_PROFILE=libmy.so ./mymain
>
> where libmy.so is the library I want to profile, and mymain is the 
> executable which links to it.
>
> This appears to create the profile dump successfully (which appears at 
> /var/tmp/libmy.so.profile), but when I try to get a readable profile 
> using sprof it fails:
>
>    $ sprof libmy.so /var/tmp/libmy.so.profile
>    sprof: failed to load shared object `libmy.so'
>
> I have a CentOS4 machine here, and doing the above on that works fine, 
> but I've had no luck at all on CentOS5 (all currently up-to-date).
>
> Can anyone help? (Please!)
>
Given that I can get this to work well on a CentOS4 machine, and I have 
tried lots of minor trivial changes to command-line, etc, but still fail 
on CentOS5, does anyone know what I can do or where I can go to progress 
this further?

My current guess is that it is a (probably very trivial) bug, although I 
recognise there still the possibility that this is simply a usage 
problem (however, if that is so, the usage since centos4 has clearly 
changed).

A more straightforward program I might have a go at debugging, but I 
don't feel competent on this one - sprof is part of the glibc package.

The glibc pages (http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/bugs.html) say that 
bugs should be reported to the distribution project first.

I would also be interested to know what the general policy is regarding 
what to do about bugs on Centos. I presume there is no way for people 
involved in centos to make changes directly, otherwise the distribution 
stops being a clone, so bugs/fixes on the centos bugzilla presumably get 
fed back to redhat at some point, and then eventually trickle down? (Is 
there a webpage somewhere explaining how this works? I know the FAQ 
states that there is no relationship with redhat, but surely they must 
exploit the bug reports somehow).

Anyway, should I report this on the CentOS bugzilla?
Would someone take it up if I did?
I assume that reporting it to redhat would be inappropriate.
If not centos, should I go on to report it to glibc?

Hywel.