It seems to me, as a fedora user that the suse beta methodology is a little counter productive.
With fedora rawhide, you install a test cd, or enable the development repo in yum, then run your update. You can continue to get the latest packages simply by running yum update. I've upgraded from FC4 -> FC5t1, FC5t2 and now test 3 is due out in a few days and all i need to do is run yum update! It'll only download the latest packages, and as most of the OS stays the same as yesterdays updates it is only a small download size. I installed a beta of opensuse to see what was different between the up and coming FC5 release and the up and coming suse release. From the installed CD there is no way to continue to test the newest packages as they are released, with yast online updates broken and no channels/repos for smart/yum as per default. Wouldn't it be sensible to keep the beta users up to date with the (b)leading edge of package builds regularly so they can provide real feedback to what works, what doesn't what is good/bad etc... This will reduce the amount of duplication of work with bug tracking, where your users aren't able to see what is fixed. From what I've seen as a beta user of opensuse is that there is very little community support, very disparate documentation of the update system, difficult to find mirrors which include factory updates and difficult to configure update mechanisms. SuSE was a leading distribution a few years ago, with 8.1 beating the hell out of RH9 with a pointy stick. Using a standard line like "Since OSS 10.1 is still in beta, there ARE no updates yet." or 'this is not intended for users' is not helpful. How does "still in beta" imply that there are no updates? Do you just release the same packages as the beta in the final? Is there actual movement between betas or does your distribution team keep updates secret until the release of an entirely new beta installer (which is broken to the extent of having to replace your previous install). By saying things like this you are excluding a community of passionate users who would like to be involved in making a distribution better. These users, as the fedora project has found are invaluable in quality assurance. Simply put, I'd imagine there are updates daily to the makeup of the distribution, updates to GTK or Cairo which need wider testing, but to beta test the distribution seems about as useful as testing a gnome live CD rather than actually seeing and contributing to the development of the distribution during the testing phase. Daily rebuilds and package updates should be made readily available via the internet to beta users. Thanks to Christoph Thiel for giving a working method of achieving what is necessary, please post this to a suse wiki page so other web users can locate it without having to join a mailing list and ask the same question as has previously been asked. I hope my views don't upset anyone, I hope that the differences between the fedora and suse beta methodologies are apparent and that the short comings of suse in this respect are highlighted enough for something to be done about it. Kind regards, Karl --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
