On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Rich Payne wrote:
> > > Why would you (the general "you") ship a "commercial" product with alpha
> > > code for a major component? Seems like someone in RH-land should be
> > > slapped for that one.
> >
> > Because it's time to release a new distro, in order to keep that revenue
> > coming in the door, so that you can stay a viable company. What's that?
> > Not much significant has changed since the last one?
>
> Interesting....I always thought glibc was a significant part of the
> distribution....seeing as almost every program makes use of it....
I _did_ say not MUCH significant, not NOTHING significant. And honestly
Rich, how many people even notice that glibc has been upgraded? Plus,
didn't I hear that it too was buggy?
> It's very easy to say things like that....and while I don't agree with
> some of RedHat's moves (mainly shipping gcc 2.96) I feel I must defend
> them on this one. Shipping X4.0.1 was a good move...sure it's going to
> cause a little pain for some people, and I'm sorry, but guess what, if we
It's going to cause a lot of pain for a lot of people. As I understand, a
good chunk of the drivers aren't working properly yet in 4.0.1 (they seem
to have concentrated on the drivers for newer cards first, which does make
sense) and I seem to recall reading something on the XFree homepage that
said exactly that, and warning people before they swtich to it. I don't
agree that shipping X4.0.1 was a good move, as it only gives the
anti-redhat people more ammunition to point out what a crappy distro they
ship. I always supported redhat in the past, but I'm starting to dislike
them, and I think that while easy to install, their distro is one of the
worst available in terms of bugginess.
I think their best option would have been to ship both XF4 and XF3
and give the user a choice, with a warning that XF4 may not work for them,
especially if they have older cards.
> keep taking this attitude that the code is 'alpha' and we shouldn't ship
> it, then it never gets the wide audience of testing that it needs to get
> out of an 'alpha' state. (Yes, the same argument could be made for gcc
> 2.96, but I feel they should have have 1.1.2 be gcc, and install 2.96
> as something else, like egcc for experimental gcc...).
I don't agree with that... just in the tiny little corner of the world
where I live, a lot of people I know are running XF4.0.1 including me. And
it works great for me. But I don't think that means that RH should ship
it as the default given how buggy some of the drivers are. People will
naturally be interested in running 4.X because it offers (and will offer)
more and more features that weren't available before. You'll have plenty
of beta testers.
I also think that many new users will go with RH7.0 because it's what
everyone recommends for new users, will find that they can't get video
working reliably, and come out of the experience thinking that Linux
sucks. Which is exactly what we don't want to happen, in my opinion.
> did, don't use them, there are a million other dists out there (all with
> something else wrong I'm sure), or even replace X4.0 with 3.3.6 if that's
> what you prefer.
Keep thinking about those new users...
> > Hmmm... better
> > provide something new so that people will think they're getting their
> > money's worth if they update to the new distro. Wait, I got it... let's
> > throw in some alpha code so that we have some new stuff...
>
> Derek, I think you posted a while ago your experiences with RH7.0, well
Nope. I haven't touched it. Don't intend to either. At best, I'll wait
for 7.1, but more likely I'll switch to debian or mandrake. Are they
perfect? Nope, but widespread opinion amongst people I know who've used
both redhat and one of those is that they are MUCH better than redhat.
> FWIW I've have no problems with it what so ever. I've had it on my
That's a good thing, of course, but you're only one out of how many cases?
You're literally the only one I've heard of who's tried it that didn't
have a fairly serious problem, as far as I can recall. Remember the sort
command? Hasn't changed much in decades... but Redhat broke it. And the
source even has regression tests to make sure it works, which by the way,
failed. But they shipped it anyway (and probably never ran the tests).
> clean install. Would I recomend this to somebody as a new user, to install
> on a production server, no, I'd say stick with 6.2 or at least wait until
> 7.1. Nobody gets a .0 release right...why do you think MS stopped using
But that is exactly the reputation that RH has... it's good for new users.
So you end up with the scenario I mentioned above. And people get turned
away from Linux because of one distro vendor.
> the .0 terminology... (Windows95,99,ME,2000)...after all, those aren't .0
> releases :)
May be true, but some get it better than others...
--
Derek Martin
Senior System Administrator
Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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