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Yes, but "very small changes" are the leading cause of project
failures in my experience dealing with software. People almost
always test the flagrantly obvious big changes - but I know of a
missile-defence test that wrote off a $200-million-plus launch vehicle for
what turned out to be a single typo in a single line of code - on a
project with far tighter formal validation and verification procedures
than I have seen in any civilian software project. Saying something
is "too small to be tested" is the same thing as saying "it doesn't
matter" - and reviewers and corporate evaluators will pick up on that
attitude, and go elsewhere.
I'm trying to resolve my present ethical difficulties in recommending
Mandrake to clients. I think it's a lot of fun - certainly more so
than Red Hat or SuSE ("Have a lot of fun").... but I expect to continue
recommending those distributions for servers and desktops for the next
year or so, at the rate that Mandrake is improving. 8.2 is a
near-great release - we're almost back up to the standard set by
7.1. I'd like very very much to believe that that release was not a
fluke; that there can be a Red-Hat-compatible release that uses the best
available mix of packages and value add to ship a killer distro. I
am personally in awe of Warly and Pixel and the rest of the team - I've
been using Linux for years but I'd certainly not take on doing an entire
distro - but if Mandrake is going to try to appeal to the general user
looking to escape the DLL hell that is Windows, and to the corporate IT
group evaluating Linux on the desktop, then you HAVE to ship a world-class
product. "Close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades; I'd
much prefer this not to blow up in my clients' faces. Or mine.
:)
Jeff Dickey
Seven Sigma Software and Services
PGP key fingerprint: 6BAC 8806 2480 BC1B 0388 2521 CB5B
552F
-------Original Message-------
Date: Saturday, March
16, 2002 07:23:38
Subject: Re: [Cooker]
Defect Handling Defects [Was: Re: [Cooker] Mandrake Linux Cooker-i586
20020313 3:06 - SHOW STOPPER!]
Ron Stodden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
> Re "wildly moving target" and "we are in deep freeze",
cooker received
> 1025 new or changed RPMs in the last 24
hours.
AFAIK re-signing packages doesn't imply
re-testing.
AFAIK there has been 17 new packages in the last 24
hours, with mainly small
changes.
In fact, there are quite many
uploads because each very small change is
uploaded ASAP.
>
Mandrake 8.2 is plainly
> still in Alpha test and they are
improperly co-opting us outside users
> to assist that process,
which should be an internal function. I am
> looking forward to when
Alpha has been completed and Beta and then Gamma
> testing can
commence, but regretfully (and foolishly) that has not
> happened
for any Mandrake release so far.
It won't happen. If you want this
kind of slow release, go to Debian. No
offense to Debian of course, our
time to release/market are quite different
(FYI, I have a chroot
'unstable' debian on my box)
. |
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