>From: "Paul Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> I don't see MITEL staff making communication difficult or
> discouraging beta testers.
Every time one beta tester mentions a problem that would
save another tester the trouble of having to solve that
same problem, the MITEL staff insists that the list
should not be used to discuss such things. If you
don't consider that discouraging then I don't think
you understand the difficulty of thoroughly testing
a complex product.
> That SHOULD be enough stimulate
> any fair minded person to ask well thought out questions that serve
> to improve the product for all our benefit.
Which is exactly why I consider this issue important. With
RedHat, Mandrake or other more popular distributions there
would be many other places to find other people's experiences
with a new or beta product. SMEserver is much more
specialized with a smaller following and there is nowhere else
to find detailed discussion about it.
> I do not think non paying consumers or testers
> have a right to demand anything beyond what is freely offered or any
> kind of guarantee or to be personally critical of individuals.
I am not making any demands. I am just stating facts about
my experience with the product that the authors may not
otherwise realize. They can ignore me or consider my
experience atypical if they want.
> I am sure that each devinfo contributor has an item where they think
> e-smith could improve. So why don't we see more contributors post
> details of what is wrong and how they would right what is not
> necessarily broken but needful of improvement?
They have tried, and repeated been told that this list is not
the proper place. How long do you expect anyone to try
to be helpful after that?
> To be concerned about lost production time on devinfo seems to me to
> be pushing it. After all, one should not be using the relatively
> untested items on devinfo for production in a business.
The changes I mentioned were in released versions. However,
the point I am trying to make is that there is no way to completely
test a product as complex as an operating system other than
running it in a production environment. One of the changes
I mentioned was in fact a bug that I (and probably others) would
have reported in the beta versions if the process were more
open. Since none of the internal development is discussed I
assumed that like the other change, it was intentional even though
it was likely to cause problems in some common situations.
> In short, I don't think its appropriate for devinfo participants to
> try to dictate policy on devinfo and I don't think it would be useful
> for e-smith to change their policy on bugs.
I guess that depends on how you define useful. I consider
reducing the changes that will break existing, working systems
in a version upgrade to be useful, and I believe that open discussion
of changes will have that effect so I have to disagree. Perhaps it
belongs on a separate list from the one used for outside developers
but there isn't that much traffic here and I'd expect exactly the
same set of people to be interested.
Les Mikesell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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