Hi Tom,
new components should NEVER be tested in conjunction with multiple other changes. NEVER.
A good idea in theory, but upgrading a distro, including FreeDOS, usually gives you updates to dozens, hundreds or thousands of packages and this is how in practice MANY users "live" updates. Even with Linux, I usually just "okay" all daily updates instead of doing them one by one. Sure, Linux apps have enough users to TEST each update before release, but I still INSTALL many at once. Of course in theory, every package has a fan community which will personally test only THAT package for each update. This is not very realistic in DOS. In addition, DOS apps barely ever depend on each other, so there is little risk of interference. However, for something as important as a FreeDOS KERNEL, it is very important for me to make it easy for many to test it! So I would suggest to include one of the newest builds in our monthly test releases. Not necessarily as the default, but in any case as something which is advertised and can easily be installed and activated. We do not know why Jeremy has never put an official release stamp on any kernel since 2021, but he and others definitely have done enough work the world deserves to see, test and enjoy :-) Remember that we have stuck to known-buggy versions even of important components such as FDISK while we wanted to wait for a version of the whole distro that deserves celebratory stamping as official release. So while the theory of testing all before releasing is great, our practice of NEITHER testing NOR releasing is depressing. Please do include updated kernels in test distros. People can do what they do with their game collection on youtube: Install the whole thing, try to start each app and present a list of which of them fail. We already had quite a few apps with graphics issues in Qemu or similar not-specifically-for-DOS VM and it always surprises me why people then tend to blame the app. If we have a TEST release with a kernel which reveals that 3 in 300 apps work worse than with the "stable" ancient 2021 kernel, we will learn something from that. Everybody still is free to use our old kernel as long as they wish if that happens to fail for fewer or different apps of our distro. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
