On Sunday 22 Dec 2002 H:35 am, Joseph Braddock wrote: > Jerry, > > Maybe you would be willing to contribute some of your time to improve > Mandrake's stability. There were numerous beta and release candidates for > Mandrake 9.0. If you are having stability issues, the time to have them > fixed is prior to the release being official. When Mandrake 9.1 is in beta > and release candidate status, maybe you can download a copy (or buy one > from cheapbytes) and submit the problems you've been experiencing to the > development team. > > This is by no means an effort to slam you, it's simply that if we want the > distro to work flawlessly and support all kinds of hardware combinations, > then the more who join the testing effort the better. > > Joeb > Apologies for jumping in here and snipping the thread but to comment (ramble ?)on the above I believe that one of the major contributions to the stability of 8.0 to 8.2 was Civileme's Crashtesting team. For those not aware of this, Civileme recruited a group of around 75 volunteers who tested all the betas and rc's on their own hardware which, while not encompassing every possible hardware configuration, did embrace a wide variety of hardware . Some Crashtesters were experts, some were newbies and this gave a mix of feedback from the point of view of user friendliness of features (thinking of such issues as software installer here). This was a co-ordinated effort targetted specifically at quality testing of new releases, indeed the principle aim was to take something such as a beta release and try to break it and then report back to one Mandrake employee who then reported to the developers where appropriate - in some cases it was not appropriate, merely a case of error between chair & keyboard .
I believe the key here is that it was solely focused on testing new releases and reporting back to Mandrake in a concise and relevant way. While all feedback is important I see a problem in an individual obtaining a beta or rc and reporting issues directly. In some cases it is reported on this or other lists that "my scanner/camera/cd rom/package/whatever doesn't work" followed by a number of posts which resolve the issue with "mine does, you need to do this" in these cases the limited time available to Mandrake developers would be misdirected and if the issue was raised without resolution on these lists and then submitted to Mandrake it is possible that the next beta would be out and Mandrake developers would be tempted to ignore it as it referred to a previous release. My solution - I don't have one. Crashtesters was IMHO a valuable effort but in these financially difficult times Mandrake are damned if they spend money on this sort of exercise and damned if they don't. -- http://www.poogle.co.uk
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