--- Jeff Dickey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ron - keep up the good work.
> Mandrake folks - ditto, but either let's have a deep
> freeze or let's get
> Cooker fixed - you can't deep freeze a wildly moving
> target.
>
> As a quality engineer, I think Ron has a legitimate
> complaint about the
> response to his defect report - one of his drives is
> rendered unusable by
> rogue modifications to lilo.conf via an action that
> no reasonable user would
> expect to modify lilo.conf. IN THE ABSENCE of
> documented defect
> classification, life cycle and escalation/resolution
> policies, and in the
> absence of documented target-user profiles
> eliminating users with multiple
> optical drives, this does sound like a defect that
> could affect a
> potentially significant population of users.
> Personally, I'd be willing to
> bet that at least one reviewer will be bitten by
> this - and Mandrake really
> needs as smooth sailing in the review press as we
> can possibly get.
>
> 8.2 CAN be the best Mandrake ever - if not the best
> Linux ever. I've been
> using Mandrake since 7.1 and have NOT been happy
> with the intervening
> releases' stability on any of my systems. It's
> great to have the latest and
> greatest kernel and packages - and people will put
> up with a certain amount
> of fit and finish polishing... but to have what (to
> the user or reviewer)
> appear to be casual and obvious inconsistencies is
> not the way to
> effectively compete against Red Hat - let alone
> Windows.
I am in complete agreement on this. I think that 8.2
is ready for beta now, not release. There are plenty
of small (and some not so small things) left that need
to be addressed. I love Mandrake, but I have yet to
have a version I can call stable. If I try to put this
out on a corporate desktop, it will create the
opposite effect that I would want, more calls from
users claiming that the system is broken. The
non-technical masses really just want something that
works properly. I feel this version is the closest to
date to getting stable, but it is still not there yet.
There are enough unresolved issues on this mailing
list to call for another release candidate. I know
that it is boring and exhausting for creative types to
get locked up in debugging, but releasing 8.2 as is
will be missing the "polish" that I feel is necessary
for an effective release geared towards the desktop.
The biggest issue, as I see it, is that once 8.2 is
released, most of the attention returns to cooker.
This leaves 8.2 bugs and annoyances pretty much
abandoned. If you are going to release now, then I
believe that there should be a continued updateng of
8.2 until it reaches that polished state. Then, you
could develop the reputation that your newest releases
are for home users and others with non-critical
systems that get the latest and greatest, while
Corporate users and other systems that depend on
stability and flawlessness for wide implementation
(generally to moderate to novice users). In short,
whenever a new version is close to release, then one
would know that the prior version has had all of its
bugs resolved and annoyances fixed and is safe for
wider deployment. Unfortunately, I can not say this
about any prior version. :-{
I don't mean to come off sounding so harsh. I actually
feel that this version has many major improvements in
speed and usability, and a lot of major bugs have been
squashed during beta. It seems so close (to me, at
least) to reaching what I would consider a release
candidate. I wish that Mandrake would take those extra steps...
=====
SI Reasoning
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change. Creativity keeps
the creator alive.
-FRANK HERBERT, unpublished notes
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage
http://sports.yahoo.com/
