--- Derek Fountain
Not sure I see your point here. No one is blaming SuSE for Netscape releasing a crap product, or anyone else releasing buggy software. My contention is that SuSE don't need to make avoidable mistakes with their distro. One way to prevent these is to offer a beta test shortly before the CDs go to manufacture. Other distros do it so your arguments that it won't work are illfounded.
Well, as much as I would also like to see a beta program available from SuSE, I'd just settle for a little faster release of some of the updates involving big ticket items, like the kernel, netscape, etc. I'v used these distro's that do the public beta program. Mandrake has a very active developer community, w/ a rapidly changing beta/development version of their distro, i.e. 'cooker'. Anyone who wants can contribute, and if it works, it generally gets kept. But as far as I'm concerned, there is no comparison btwn the overall stability of SuSE 6.4 and Mandrake 7.0/7.1. At least on my systems, they were flaky as all get out. Plus everyone throws a hissy fit every time a buggy package comes out of RedHat, so I don't think they are such good example of the merits of a beta program. Debian is about the only one I've used that has a reasonably effective beta program, but they aren't as much a commercial entity as companies like SuSE and RedHat, etc. Thus they (the Debian community) are a lot more forgiving of delays. Would you like it if you had to wait as long for 7.1 as its been btwn Debian 2.1 and 2.2? I wouldn't. All in all, I think SuSE does a pretty reasonable job of testing things in house, and I'm not convinced that a public beta would gain them much from a purely technical standpoint. I do think it would gain some more user support, though how much is questionable. Monte __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ -- 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