Re: [Cooker] Mandrake 9.1 Should be Delayed

[George Mitchell]

Sascha Noyes wrote:

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On Friday 07 March 2003 11:09, 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
   

I agree with Warly here. People do not seem to notice that Mandrake has a 
certain development philosophy: 

1. Release every 6 months
2. Include the latest stable versions of popular software, irrespective 
whether it might be unpolished.

This has always been the case with Mandrake, and that is why they also have 
such a large following with "power-users" (not guru's but not complete 
newbies). Anybody who thinks that the above two points are new has not been 
around to see many of Mandrake's releases. I think if you want to get 
Mandrake to change their policy (like the Debian-like 3-phase suggestion) you 
are going to have to have pretty good arguments for why this would be better 
(and not lead to eg. Debian-like outdatedness in the stable version)

Best,
Sascha Noyes
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I am not referring to issues of polish.  I am referring to major things 
that do not work.  I am not suggesting that a Debian system be employed 
to make Mandrake spot perfect like Debian, only that it be employed to 
make sure that major bugs are erradicated.  I have no problem with the 6 
mo release cycle either if it were buffered by a Debian like system. 
And Mandrake has released unstable versions of popular software in the 
past including KDE.  That should not happen.