On Wed, April 20, 2005 11:23 am, Christopher Sawtell said:
[snip]
>
> That's why the distributions offer testing, unstable, and stable levels.
> The public do the testing at the testing and unstable levels. Fedora is,
> and
> always has been, at the testing to unstable level.
[snip]
Interesting that you use debian as your yardstick... which as you probably
know is my weapon of choice. There is also an experimental distribution,
which is *still* better tested than this.

But where do you stick Ubuntu, Mandrake, SuSE/Novell, Gentoo and others on
your scale? Unlike most of the readers of this list, this is my
livelihood. I *do* run RHEL ( well White Box! ) because Oracle demand that
I do for support. However, Oracle runs just as well on Fedora Core 3, and
I can use a 2.6 kernel. Whopee - but thanks a bunch Larry. You've
subverted the whole cause of Linux by demanding that you pay for it. Or,
given your viewpoint, has he?

I think that my past is colouring my impression of what an acceptable
level of testing is - I started life developing software for medical
physics where the penalty for getting it wrong could be rather serious -
but maybe your impressions are skewed too far the other way. You still
download FC from fedora.redhat.com, so their name and reputation is still
linked to the product.

Maybe we should start a campaign to improve the quality of testing? If
everyone accepts this level of software as the norm, then we're never
going to get anywhere. I run a F/LOSS project, and even taking the initial
software download from the developers and getting it to a state that it
compiles and installs cleanly when extracted from the sourceforge cvs
server took over a weeks work. Should I have just stuck it up there, and
ignored the moans of the interested parties who'll never come back and
never support my project?

I think the implications of sticking any old cr*p onto sourceforge and
calling it open software are very wide ranging, and need to be carefully
considered. The implications of (in effect) doing this and ten putting
your brand name to it are far, far worse!

Steve

-- 
Windows: Where do you want to go today?
MacOS: Where do you want to be tomorrow?
Linux: Are you coming or what?

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