Daniel with respect, I did not mean to present that the solution to improving the quality of GNU/Linux is for centralised control.
However, people are in control of aspects of Linux - such as release decisions about key sub systems, or release decisions as it relates to Distros. These decision makers have the power to conform, or not to conform as some unfortunately choose, to decades old principles to do with what consitutes an alpha, beta or production release. Clearly, there are allot of problems when parties who are in control declare a release as stable when its not. With the kernel, I gave the example where Andrew Morton shared with us that he often see's regression bugs go without fixes, he see's developers ignore bug reports. There is other examples too in other key sub systems of just about any Linux distro. Take for example, all the problems with X releases and how most recently a new release of X was made with a blocker bug and other serious bugs. If more focus and discipline was put into what constitutes a production release I think that would be a very good direction to take. Who cares if there is more release candidates for kernels or more betas for X, if its not ready its not ready. Some bugs can be tricky for a developer to replicate and resolve. Its human nature not to see the severity the same way with an issue if it's not happening on your machine. I dont see proper release management stifling any freedoms in FOSS projects. It just means having a proper quality standard before bits are declared stable and ready for production. I greatly enjoy Ubuntu, over all other distro's Ive tried (Arch, OpenSuse, Fedora) but I am certainly not the only person Ive seen sharing their views that arbitary time based releases arent condusive to good software.
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