Adam,
No good. It cannot be done for two good reasons:
1. The components of the beta CDs have been updated offline from Cooker
as necessary to provide an installable viable {?} system and so the beta
does _NOT_ correspond to Cooker at any time. The diffences are supposed
to make their way into Cooker, but this process is overlapped with the
normal Cooker updates, so the cooker tree does not meet the basic
requirements for beta testing.
2. There is no concurrent freeze on the Cooker tree with beta timings.
There should be, for the beta test duration. The only people who
need beta CDs are those are those who are very first-time PC Linux users
or those beta testers withot internet access (none?). In any case, the
CDs would be easily construced by existing mandrake users (use mkcd)
from the frozen cooker-tree.
Ron.
Adam Williamson wrote:
> Surely for your situation the sensible method of testing would simply be
> to install Cooker and update it frequently with urpmi --auto-select? By
> downloading each beta as it comes out you're downloading a bunch of
> stuff you don't need and thus increasing the time. Keeping my Cooker up
> to date requires an average of maybe 40 megs download per day, and I
> install a bunch of stuff (I have both KDE3 and Gnome 2 installed, for
> example) which ought to be manageable on a modem - maybe write a script
> for your system to be updated overnight?
>
> I don't agree with the idea of drastically lengthening the beta cycle to
> pander to people with slow connections. The intention of a beta is not
> to be available to everybody; it is to be available to enough people for
> enough testing to be done to create a stable end-product. I think the
> amount of bug reports from people using the betas shows there are enough
> people out there with fast enough connections to test the betas.
--
Ron. [Melbourne, Australia]
Web site: http://www.ains.net.au/~ronst/
