On Monday 18 March 2002 17:28, Keld J�rn Simonsen wrote: > Hi! > > I joined the beta testing for Mandrake because I like the distro, > but chose to run RedHat 7.2 instead of Mandrake 8.1 as the latter > had too many things not working for me.
Like what? I hoped that if I joined > the testing I could contribute to a much more stable and error free > distro. I think that was achieved to some degree, but there are still > a number of problems as released in 8.2 that I do not have with > RH 7.2 . > > I think the quality of the distro itself is very important. > We can have all kinds of nifty upgrades, but ordinary people > do not download them, and stick to the initial releases as they > come on the distro CDs. > > Have MandrakeSoft any ideas of how well used the upgrading > SW is? How big a percentage of your users do not upgrade? This coming from a redhat user? Have you looked at the bugtraq stats at all? Redhat accounts for more than 1/2 of all security updates for ALL counted linux distro's combined! > Anyway, this was my first beta, as it may have showed in > my reporting. I hoped that the release policy was that you > would not ship before most errors were solved. Not so, you > had a deadline. Well, it is good to know this, that these are > the rules of the game. I would like to suggest that Mandrakesoft > try to make an effort to make a stability release, where > the release is not so much deadline driven, but driven by > the non-severity of the bugs. I would say Mandrake did an excellent job with this release and all in the past, I use Mandrake as a server for my ISP and I have never had a problem with the distro on a final release, except for a logrotate bug in 7.0 - whichever that was. We have some systems that have 8.1 cooker, we've kept up the security updates, one of these systems has 230 days uptime. I also run cooker on my laptop and normally don't have many issues even with cooker. Did you report the bugs during cooker or did you just wait till today when 8.2 was final to complain? > A little more concrete: Mandrake has an enterprise edition. > There is not so much hype about this. And enterprises really > appreciate stability, and lack of errors. Maybe Mandrakesoft > could try to fix all the errors in 8.2 and then issue this as > the Enterprise edition, with the added bells and whistles that > you normally do for that? And without the big specific deadline, or > with a deadline that would allow a lot of testing and bug solving. > > Kind regards > keld
