Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1495 mails)

[Jim Henderson <hendersj@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:15:13 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On Wednesday, 2009-04-01 at 04:23 -0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
[...]
> > a problem.  As a user of the product, I'm a member of the community and
> > I want to give back in any way I am able to.  That's how we make a
> > better product, right?
>
> I have to agree with all you have said... :-)
>
>    I'd like this post to go to the project list, where the right
>    audience is, but I leave that to you.

Feel free to send along to whomever you feel is appropriate - I'm not 
subscribed to the project list myself; as a new user (I see it is on 
gmane and am adding it to my list now), I wouldn't want to seem 
presumptuous on that list to come in and start off with this message. :-)

> Yes, I agree that big issues should be "repaired" on the same distro
> version, but I don't know if there are enough resources for that.
> Currently we have to wait for the next release to solve that, which
> usually means that a new set of bugs will be "released" too. At the end,
> we just have to choose which set of bugs we can live with, and choose
> the corresponding suse release.

Certainly, but again I would point back at the common argument that the 
community is bigger than Microsoft's development workforce as an 
advantage - this statement would seem to contradict the assertion that 
one of the benefits of OSS is that it's a community effort instead of a 
relative handful of software developers.

> Currently, I'm staying with 11.0 because there are bugs in 11.1 that
> impede me upgrading. The main one was that beagle exercised some
> functionality in reiserfs that was broken and caused the kernel to
> crash. This has been repaired with the last kernel update, but alas! now
> my machine does not fully suspend to disk because it doesn't power off
> at the last moment - and as this feature is part of my work routine, I
> can't live without it, so, --> no upgrade.

Interesting - another reason to consider disabling beagle.  I have 
mentioned before that I use beagle on occasion, and I find the idea good 
(and it generally works for me), but the implementation does leave 
something to be desired (and I'm sure plenty on this list would say "at 
least!", so let's not reignite that old discussion, please. ;-) )

> At the same time, there are features in 11.0 that are broken: for
> instance, writing to an external HD via USB, formatted as reiserfs, is
> badly broken, which means that I have to boot 10.3 or 11.1 to do my
> saving. 

Weird, I have an external USB drive on my x86_64 system that is reiserfs 
and seems to work OK.  I even export it over NFS.  Is there a bug that I 
should be looking at that talks about this issue?

> Or, another is that mounting LUKS encrypted, reiserfs formatted,
> read-only media (DVD) is broken because the kernel tries to _write_ on
> the dvd. Another one that is broken, is that writing big files to an
> XFS, encrypted, filesystem crashes the system.
>
> I consider all those big issues... but I have no hope of seeing any of
> them solved soon. Not in 11.0, perhaps not even in 11.1. Those things
> have been appearing over the last 2 years, they are slowly
> deteriorating. I expect things that work to keep working... but it is
> not the case, things are breaking and they are not solved.

I understand your frustration - as you probably guessed.  At the same 
time, though, these particular issues would seem to affect even 
potentially a small group of users.  Things like zypper creating huge log 
files potentially affect everyone - or boost breaking encfs (encfs has 
some popularity from what I've seen).

I understand the need to prioritise the issues and work on the most 
serious ones, and fully support that of course....
 
> Effort seem to concentrate on highly visible features, like kde4.

...but things like KDE4 (which, like it or not, for 11.0 was something of 
a disaster from a PR standpoint at the very least) do distract from 
things that affect all users.  KDE4 issues don't affect me because I'm a 
GNOME user.  Core issues in KDE4, though, are best addressed IMHO by the 
KDE team and not the openSUSE team.  The encfs/boost issue is a packaging/
build issue for the distro.  KDE4's usability problems aren't, so I'd 
consider that a different class of issue to be addressed by a different 
group of people.

Jim


-- 
 Jim Henderson
 Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx