Purple Shirt wrote:
I also would NEVER expect a precompiled kernel upgrade (2.2.14->2.2.16) to keep alsa sound functional. That is lunatic. Purely to the fact that this kernel is different from the one before how can all binaries which refer to 2.2.14 still work with 2.2.16? Alsa is picky about the kernel version so why blame this on SuSE?
Actually, it was about OSS, not ALSA. We have the sources for ALSA (obviously), so there's no problem with that.
I think you depend too much on one vendor(SuSE) and one mailing list instead of going out there and using all the resources available to you.
People will argue they pay us for it... it's kind a true, and the solution lies in the middle. It's a compromise of - control (who can do what to what software) - standards (we cannot do stuff that makes us absolutely incompatible with what everyone else has) - different expectations (new users, power users, people who want to try everything and the kitchen sink, people who want a rock-solid system for very few things only) - time and engineering resources (can't do all those great ideas at once...) Example that touches several fields: Authors tend to make changes to their packages that make them behave differently, and now those people will yell at us that liked the program as it was, but shipping the old version is also no option, or changing the behaviour of the new version back to the one of the old version is a) a lot of work and b) incompatible with what the rest of the world is using. Concrete example: pppd (as PPP-server). In SuSE Linux 6.3 the new version of pppd suddenly required the IP field in pap-secrets, and just would refuse to give a client an IP address if that IP was not in pap-secrets (4th field). The older version didn't require this (and what for anyway?!). It took me a whole day at a customer to figure it out (had to look at the sources). Will people complain to us (it worked before, after all)? Sure! Are they right? Sure, they bought it from us. Could we have done anything about it? No, how are we supposed to find such changes? We cannot review the sources of every single program, and test only a fractionof possible setups. That means: You will continue to find such stupid bugs. Or, alternative solution: we release a product that's updated only every other year or so, a minimum system (1 CD at most), and for this we promise to do a much more thorough bug-hunting. -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq