Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (172 mails)

[Jim Henderson <hendersj@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:57:40 +0200, Martin Schlander wrote:

> Onsdag den 1. april 2009 20:50:52 skrev PGNet:
> >   http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2009-04/msg00002.html
>
> > there
> > needs to be some middle ground found for project "support" (however
> > that ends up being defined) other that "Go buy SLES/D ..."
>
> openSUSE provides security fixes and fixes for major bugs for 24 months.
>
> That's better than Fedora (~12 months), Mandriva (~12 months) _and_
> Ubuntu (18 months, non-lts).
>
> Even for Debian it's only 30 months (assuming the 18 month release cycle
> is followed successfully, which it of course never is.). And for Ubuntu
> LTS it's only on 36 months on desktops.

I think you miss my point here, Martin.  It's not about the stated 
support timeframe.  It's about the perception - a perception backed by my 
own experiences in trying to get issues affecting my systems fixed.

> I think this area - the level of support for openSUSE - is one of the
> areas where openSUSE is really strong, therefore demanding more seems a
> bit unrealistic. And developers wasting time on old stuff, takes away
> resources from doing useful things with current stuff.

"Demanding" is a little strong.  I was commenting on the *perception* 
that it seems to take a bit of pressure to get patches backported.  Take 
the encfs/boost example.  That issue was discovered and reported when 
11.0 wasn't "old stuff" - 11.1 was still in development.  The gsynaptics 
bug I also comment on was discovered pre-11.1 (and come to think, I don't 
know that the fixes from 11.1 did get backported, as my touchpad on my 
D620 still doesn't work right because I can't disable circular 
scrolling).  Even when reported, the fix was "upgrade to 11.1 pre-release 
because the fix is committed there and won't be in 11.0".

I do not mean *any* disrespect to the team at all.  Please understand 
that - I am generally VERY happy with openSUSE.  But it seems that too 
often, I see suggestions in various venues (such as OSF and the users 
mailing list) to upgrade the OS (a major undertaking - and I run 11.0 
currently on 6 different systems here at home), and then the response to 
"well, I'm not ready to do that" is "if you want professional support, 
move to SLE".  I'm not asking for professional support; quite frankly, I 
prefer the community support model - having participated as a recipient, 
a provider, and a leader (in the Novell forums) - to be generally higher 
quality than paid professional support.

As I said in the users list, I'm a user and thus part of this community.  
I can't contribute code because I don't trust myself to write good enough 
code (nor, maybe more importantly, do I have the time), but I can 
contribute in other ways by helping test and reporting when I see what I 
think is a problem, either with processes or with the software itself.

There is always room for improvement in processes.  But if nobody is 
willing to say "hey, this could be better", then we don't get the 
perspectives needed to find out how things could be improved.  I want 
openSUSE to continue to be the best distribution out there (and I *do* 
think it's the best one I've worked with).

Jim
-- 
 Jim Henderson
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