Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-testing (14 mails)

["Quentin Jackson" <Quentin.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, I understand.  So I guess the question is, what is the short and
long term goal of OpenSuSE?  Personally I think the long term goal
automatically = the short term goal without a lot of people realising
it.  When I first started using linux, the idea of building brick upon
brick and improving on previous releases was and still is fantastic, I
think it actually drives a lot of people to keep doing this, but
inevitably changes mean bugs and bugs mean some of the bricks get kicked
out below us but most people don't think far enough ahead to realise
what is happening here.

The way I see it, the manner in which we are making these changes means
the goal of having a truly stable OS will never be achieved which leaves
me wondering what is the point of all this?  Where is the next step for
distro's in the opensource movement?  How will a community distro ever
reach mainstream with such unpredictable results?  Let's face it, even
post release there are no gaurantees that anything unfixed will be
fixed, maybe in the next release but chances are something different
will be broken there too.  At times we will get close, other times will
be bad, but there will still be no way anyone will know how good a
release is unless they try it for themselves which I think you'll agree
is not a very good advertisement for a distro.  

> From personal experience there have been 2 good releases since the 9.x
series only, SuSE 9.3 and OpenSuSE 10.3 and even they were not perfect.
That's 2 out of 8 releases or 25% of the great work that is done.  It
seems like a waste to me.

I think you'll also agree that there are some things that you just
cannot release with if they're not running right.  Two examples would be
no X or no bootloader.  There are many more, these should truly be
blockers, maybe we could start by tasking someone with identifying those
and laying down the beginnings of some absolute rules?

All in all, if this isn't already mandated somewhere perhaps a
compromise could be that no release is considered final until an x.3
release and maybe even only that release will continue to receive the
best backporting of fixes, stability improvements etc?  That way people
who want the latest can always upgrade to any release, bug test etc,
people who want stable know to get a .3 release which comes around every
2 years.  We could effectively consider x.0, x.1 x.2 = RC1, RC2, RC3 and
the x.3 = final.

I think these two points would start to give to point us in the right
direction, maybe even start giving us an advantage over other distros
including some of the more stable ones.

What do you think?

Q

On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 18:08 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> "Quentin Jackson" <Quentin.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > Well I found the priority documentation at
> > http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs/Definitions#Bug_Severities, it seems quite
> > good, so further to below, I feel we should not be releasing a distro
> > with any outstanding job having a criticality over Normal.  Obviously
> > there would be exceptions, but it seems that we do indeed release a
> > distro with 'Major' severity outstanding calls correct?  So by proxy
> > that would be saying that we're OK releasing a distro that has "Major
> > loss of function"?
>
> We include priorities as well - not have any P1 bugs.
>
> In the past we had as policy no blocker.  No bugs with severity above
> normal is not feasible - we would never ever release ;-) or release with
> an outdated distribution.
>
> There's indeed quite a difficult balance between time and quality - and
> we do this also with limiting the changes we allow to make to the
> distribution at some time,
>
> Andreas

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