On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 09:26:41AM +0100, Stephan Kulow wrote:
You seem to misunderstand the phrases Beta and FACTORY. If you don't want to take part in testing and reviewing early development phases, I guess you're subscribed to the wrong mailing list.
Stephan, I think you are partially right here but partially wrong as well. It is correct that one has to expect things breaking in development or test releases. But nobody explained why this breakage has to be provided intentionally by removing the old method before the new method was in-place at all. Even when there is a reason for that it should be explained. The problem here was as well that this problem was known to responsible people (they even confessed that it was intentional) but not announced. Instead all people testing from outside SUSE hat to find themselves that the mechanism was broken. Giving no information about such problems or giving the information very slowly provides the public with a very bad impression on what is going on. Typically I adhere to the saying: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." --- If you don't want people think you are doing stupid things you should give them the chance to understand decissions that are not obviously correct and thus could be considered stupid. So the whole story here is not about expecting or not expecting bugs in software but about not communicating known bugs and doing questionable decissions without explaining the reasons for the decissions. If you had reasons for the decissions and communicated them at least for the smart people it is likely that they accept them. If you didn't have reasons for the decission but there are known reasons against it the decission was obviously wrong and there is no point in blaming other people not having understood something completely unrelated. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."