On Mon, 2002-03-18 at 20:41, Ben Reser wrote: > Now I think we all here can understand (even if we don't agree with) > Mandrake's time crunch for producing this distribution. They have > committments to meet.
For what it's worth... I have worked as a technical lead and as a product manager for commercial software. The pressures on a company to release a product at a set time are very strong. Investers, directors, financers all want to see it; retail channel firms such as Ingram or Microage want to see it, so they get your product stocked on store shelves; and frankly, users want to see it, because they want to be able to say, "I'm running Mandrake Linux 8.2 and it's really great!". I also know that a small company can't afford to have a whole lot of people dedicated to release engineering. Which means that communication becomes very hard. It seems to me that Mandrake is doing a superb job of communicating with a large developer community, overall. If there are frustrations at times, if things get dropped in the last couple of weeks, I don't think anyone should be surprised. So, it is a time for patience, tranquility and strength. And now, with a release uploading, for congratulations. Perhaps in a week or two, the Mandrake people will have recovered enough to think about process improvements and changes! Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000 Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001
