On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> I just want to reemphasize that I wasn't intending to flame anyone. But my
> point remains. When linux was a totally ad-hoc thing, there was an excuse
> for this kind of thing. Now, with companies like mandrake building and
> shipping distros, I sometimes wonder if there is even a pretense at quality
> control. I don't think mandrake is any worse than redhat, caldera or
> whoever, and I don't expect bottomless, free maintenance, but I do expect
> something close to stable. I haven't tried 7.02, but from what I heard,
> the initial 7.0 was absolutely terrible, in terms of quality. I know there
> are limited man-hours to do a new release, but if I had a choice, I'd opt
> for some larger chunk to be spent on QA as opposed to neat new features. I
> haven't played with other distros before, so I have no idea how they stack
> up against mandrake on this issue.
I am inclined to agree to a point. I had problems with suse (nothing would
compile without some obscure version of a file I had never heard of e.g.
/usr/include/ stuff or libc.so.splash), so I switched to Mandrake - largely on
the advertised benefits. So far it has been a total disaster, although I know a
little, and the disaster is not of my doing either. A cd was faulty, I am
getting screwed up root partitions (e2fsck throws me out with the -p option and
then throws up 50 errors) the install goes crazy - losing the database, and so
forth. Mandrake doesn't seem to cut the mustard unless nothing fazes you, in
which case you don't need a distribution anyhow. I have picked packages at
least six tiomes without getting it right. When I went to RTFM, the FM is only
'how to shine', not 'how to fix'.
Suse by comparison was as simple as windoze '95 to install.
--
Regards,
Declan Moriarty.
