Re: [Cooker] Mandrake 9.1 Should be Delayed

[George Mitchell]

Warly wrote:

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
 

Non productive work?  How about 3D accelleration that doesn't work on 
Radeon cards?  Is that one of the things you consider trivial and not 
worth correcting?  I have a Radeon VE that works flawlessly on install 
with Red Hat 8.0.  It is a screaming mess on install with Mandrake 9.0 
and still is not working with Cooker which is just about ready to 
release.  Problems with ATI and nVidea products.  Only the two most 
popular video cards on the market.  Should I just go out and buy yet 
another video card.  Oh wait, lets check supported hardware on Mandrake 
site.  Ah yes, all video cards are 'known to work'.  Lets look at the 
'tested' category.  Whoopee, no cards in that category.  So face it, 
Mandrake QA is failing, and Mandrake refuses to own up to it.  I really 
don't know whether stable/unstable is the answer, but for sure something 
needs to be done.  I appreciate Mandrake enough to put up with this 
nonsense, but how many new users will?  This is no way to win the 
desktop and you should admit it and be open to new ideas.