Marcus Meissner wrote:
Why were apt and smart rejected? Both are mature systems that provide this functionality.
I do not know. We had kinda strict requirements on Patches, Add On Product handling, which might not have been fulfilled by those.
Obviously not strict enough... You might want to ask the decision makers in that group whether or not they are suffering from "not invented here" syndrome. I suspect their requirements for something developed outside their office are far stricter than something written by one of their own.
Why not simply ship 10.1 with the old YOU, then? I don't understand why zen/rug was required to be in 10.1, since it obviously wasn't ready. Why not simply wait for 10.2 or SLES 10?
SLES 10 is using the SUSE Linux 10.1 codestream, so both are interlocked releases.
I don't understand... Is OpenSuSE going to be just "cut wherever we are in SLES development and ship, regardless of what's broken"?
I think this is one of our greatest fears as sysadmins. We're really worried that Novell considers OpenSuSE to be a beta-test dumping ground for SLES, much like Fedora is for RedHat.
Frankly said, to some degree it is a ground of introduction new features which we will use in later products.
I think the question is really "to what degree"... If OpenSUSE is simply a good distro with SLES feeding off of it, that's great. If OpenSUSE is "we'll throw whatever software we feel like at it and let the user test it for us", that's a problem. If OpenSUSE is solid, with SLES being "more solid", that's great. Of course, there are always fairly obscure things that could be missed in OpenSUSE's quicker release schedule that is fixed in time for SLES, that's only to be expected.
It also is a stable community release done every 8 months.
I think we have different definitions of "stable" if 10.1 is the benchmark.
If we have to look at every OpenSuSE release with suspicion: "What did Novell break on this release?", we'll switch to another distro.
As said multiple times, I personally hope that we will not do it again (and there is not much potential to do so anyway).
I hope so, too. We're honestly not here to argue with you personally, but to ask, perhaps even beg, that you take what we're saying to Novell and make them understand that if they treat OpenSUSE as a bastard stepchild, people will abandon SuSE entirely, in droves. Look at Fedora. For a while, people kept using it because they'd used RedHat previously. Now it's being dropped left and right for Ubuntu. Every Ubuntu user is going to now recommend Ubuntu or its parent Debian at their workplace. Whereas RedHat used to be virtually synonymous with Linux here in the states, many of us are increasingly regarding it as irrelevant, left behind, and riding out on name recognition. Linux has always been about choice, and I'll be the first to admit that as a whole, we're an awfully fickle bunch. I still believe that right now, SuSE has the best technical release. But as I said, we're fickle, and many sysadmins will jump to another distro, even its technically lesser to suse, simply to have the piece of mind that they're not being screwed with by company execs.