On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 08:46:36PM -0500, Brad Felmey wrote: > On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 20:03, Galileo wrote: > > Another proof that Mandrake releases unfinished products. > > http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/advisories/advisory.php?name=MDKA-2003:020 > > More that 250 MB of updates excluding SRPMS. How the hell did this > > happen ? > > It looks like x.2 doesn't mean a thing anymore. 7.2 and 8.2 were > > perfect. Why isn't so with 9.2 ? > > You, my fine feathered friend, are full of foo.
I think you're being too harsh! It's a valid worry! > 7.2 and 8.2 were decent, but not perfect. 9.2 even needing the updates > is a heck of a lot better than either 7.2 or 8.2. I know - I've used > every Mandrake since 5/6 and run cooker since 7.1. Nobody/Nothing is perfect, but there are ways to avoid this kind of breakage. > They could always be like SuSE or RedHat and consider non-security > bugfixes and updates to be next point release. Mandrake is bending over > backwards. Schedules have to be kept, but they didn't quit working when > it was cut - they kept at it to make a good product even better. I agree that in the rough outline, Mandrake 9.2 is wonderful and fixes a lot of things that were broken earlier, but that's just what a Linux distro is; in the process of "getting there". (Same as windows, except that M$ can enforce the support of hardware manufacturers) The thing to avoid is to have silver (pressed) CDs of mdk releases with so many critical bugs on them. When someone installs Mandrake for the first time, he/she won't know how IMPORTANT the updates are! Of course you need to do updates these days for any OS, but with MDK you need them immediately to fix things you would assume are not broken, because they are such a basic feature (screensavers). That's what is wrong here and it is legitimate to complain about it, IMHO. Hopefully the new Anthill will provide a means to collect bugs of a released version. I'm sure this will be seen in the amount of updates which will be released by Mandrake during the lifetime of 9.2/9.1/9.0. But most importantly, the next release should be checked for regressions w.r.t. these bugs. People tend to give up when a pet peeve is not fixed after a while. Speaking of pet peeves, constant printing problems is one of mine (PDF files, OpenOffice, Crossover Office, etc...) ;-) Cheers Simon
