George Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > And this exactly illustrates the problem with the current development > model. Come hell or high water the product WILL ship, even if it > turns out to be the buggiest ever. Mandrake and other distributors > are entering a period where they are merely replicating proprietary > vendors by becoming slaves of a ship date and shipping the whole > unfinished mess out for consumers to choke on. > > That is why it is time to change the development model. Development > should be modularized, with each major compenent following a separate > development path maintained in sync with the external free software > developers. These components should be folded into the distribution > ONLY when bulletproof while the distribution itself gets released > periodically. This would decentrallize the development of the > distribution and sharpen quality control. It would also focus > resources on the problems rather than on continuing to persue > enhancements at the expenses of stability. A big part of the problem > is that Cooker spends most of its life as a mish mash of incomplete > and buggy code and then ends up in a big rush to stabalize everything > simultaneously as time runs out. Releasing a distro with the current > flow of complaints on bugzilla is nuts. But then, as before, I wil > somehow make it work by regressing various components backward to > previous versions in order to come up with a better functioning whole.
I do not agree. There is no point spending 4 months in stabilizing a already deprecated distribution. Strict release date are good because it is worthless to correct all the very single bug that will be ignore by 95 percent of the customers and will be fixed in an update before the CD are on the shelves. Stabilizing a distro too much is mainly a non productive work, and we are supposed to develop and create new pieces of software and innovative things, not replacing any _very_unprofessionnal_ spelling mistakes or titlebar color in the 4000 packages of the distributions -- Warly
