:~>Second, knowing the long production schedules of magazines and of
:~>mass-producing CD's I was curious to know if theses schedules were the
:~>driving force behind the abrupt cessation of the beta testing and the
:~>subsequent release of 7.1 in early July.
No. Our beta-testing period for 7.1 was 3-4 x longer than for 7.0, and
there was nothing even near to "abrupt cesation" of testing. There were 3
public betas, and we did not receive any "critical bug reports" for the
third one, so we had all the reason to beleive that 7.1 will be a good
product (and it is).
Of coarse, as soon as we announced a "final" version, bug reports started
pooring in again, but this is unfortunately "normal". Some of
these bugs are really unpleasant, for instance:
* / partition must be < 8GB (drakX bug)
* problems with some SCSI cards (but better overal SCSI support)
* Upgrade times 2-3 h, (and in extreme cases +=12h!) :-\
* several security updates even before we were able to ship CD-s :-((
but none are really "show stoppers" (workarounds exist), and I still think
that overal quality of 7.1 is miles better than 7.0, or any previous
Mandrake release:
- hardware support has improved immensly (for instance UDMA66 & USB
support)
- upgrade actually works quite nicely now (yes, it is slow)
- new menu system is much friendlier than the old one.
- new gnome
- many many small improvements everywhere in the system, which you may not
even notice in the beginning. Three quick examples: "supermount"
enable/disable script is much robuster in 7.1, Xsession is ssh-avare, and
"gimp" now accepts Xscanimage plugin.
In addition: there is no speciall connection between Mandrake and "Maximum
linux" i know of, and even if there were one I would not accept the idea
of stopping a beta testing period because a magazine wants to press the
CD-s. Neither would Jerome nor Warly (3 musketiers of QA team), and Jean
Loup would probably sooner jump from the bridge than allow such nonsense.
Fact is: Beta testing period was long compared to life-span of the
product, we all worked like mad, and at the end we were half-dead but
happy with 7.1. Yes sure, there are still bugs left, but there
are limits to what can do.
yours
Denis
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Dr. Denis Havlik <http://www.ap.univie.ac.at/users/havlik>
Mandrakesoft ||| e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Quality Assurance (@ @) (private: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
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