On Sunday 11 September 2005 7:57 pm, Alejandro Forero Cuervo wrote:
I fail to see how having an additional set of CDs, marked as "additional" or "optional" would hurt you: you'd get exactly the same CDs, with exactly the same quality, plus an additional set of "optional" or "additional" CDs with additional packages.
It's not really a question of it 'hurting me', it's more a matter of maintaining the image of the distro, especially the box version that one is actually paying out hard cash to obtain. As I said earlier, I would not object to a repository that contained '3rd party' packages that SUSE makes no claim of any responsibility. But the stuff I receive on the media in the box set implies, at least to me, that it meets SUSE's quality standards and has passed QC, so I can trust that I will encounter no issues using any packages on that media.
Just in case you got the right idea, I am in no way advocating that broken / low low quality packages into SuSE! As I said, I am advocating alternatives that would get us plently of relatively good-quality packages in the distribution. Broken or low low quality packages should be removed. As I said, the "only Novell decides what goes in" approach is way too extreme.
Sorry, but I don't see how that would work. You say 'broken or low quality packages would be removed', well who does that? It's SUSE's name on the distro, in order to even know a package is broken, they would have to QC it, incurring that expense. Why should they bother?
For example, I plan to make a few of my own that I think have very very little chances of ending up "broken or low low quality". With the current approach, these get locked out of the official distribution.
I think that is asking too much of SUSE to track and figure out what is broken and what is low quality.
I would hold Novell 100% responsible for the SuSE Linux release but I would be inclined to allow more participation in the SuSE Linux OSS products (which I think would end up being of very good quality overall anyway).
Hey, I have absolutely no objection to having 3rd party stuff on a downloadable ISO or a repository online somewhere. I just think that loading up the official boxed set distro with a bunch of extra stuff unnecessarily increases the cost of producing the product and would confuse (and potentially infuriate if they were broken) new users who already have package overload. Not trying to argue or anything, just presenting a user perspective on what it means to the user when they lay out cash for a boxed set. I know I expect things to just work, that's why I pay for it. Scott -- POPFile, the OpenSource EMail Classifier http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ Linux 2.6.11.4-21.9-default x86_64 SuSE Linux 9.3 (x86-64)