Alternate solution:
Ron, get to know more people in your local area, some of whom have
broadband. I also live in Melbourne, Australia. You could always meet
more people as the Slashdot Meetups. In the past i've also gotten a beta
set of CDs of Mandrake from www.lsl.com.au (for Australian's only),
although they don't seem to list them at the moment, for about AUD$7 per
cd.
On Wed, 2002-08-21 at 11:24, Ron Stodden wrote:
> 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/
>
>
>
>
>
>
--
- Antony Suter (sutera internode on net) "Exner"
- "Tools to make tools."
