On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 5:44 AM, Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@inai.de> wrote:
In http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2012-06/msg00618.html :
a gcc update would be useful, this probably has to happen very early in the cycle (right after the release).
It looks like this proposal has potential, but I wonder and ponder.
I went on to compare the development schedules of a few groups. Because I could not find the freeze dates for older openSUSE anymore (why remove them from the detailed view?), I took RC1 as freeze point.
#Group Ratio days between merge-phase and frozen-phase # openSUSE_11.4 7.50 210/28(RC1) openSUSE_12.1 8.62 224/26(RC1) openSUSE_12.2 7.78 210/27(RC1) (prerel-freeze: 6.18, 204/33) Debian_4 4.73 553/117 Debian_5 2.34 476/203 Debian_6 2.91 536/184 Fedora_17 1.22 111/91 Fedora_16 1.67 105/63 Fedora_15 1.06 104/98
I don't have numbers, but I think Debian has the most packages in a release, followed by Fedora, followed by openSUSE. The number of packages matters for estimating effort and hardware resources required.
And now for the winners:
Linux_3.4 0.24 12/50 Linux_3.3 0.25 15/59 Linux_3.2 0.24 14/58
I don't think it's fair to compare the kernel with an entire distro!
My interpretation: there is not enough testing going on in openSUSE.
Software engineering metrics are a well-established area of study and have been since the days of Fred Brooks' "Mythical Man-Month". These are wheels that need not be re-invented. I think the first order of business in the post-12.2 planning is to come up with goals for the next release relative to the other community distros and the user communities. 1. Given that a *new* user has decided to try Linux, how does he/she decide which distro? 2. What makes a long-standing Linux user switch distros? 3. How does openSUSE propose to attract new users faster than Fedora, Ubuntu and Mint? I can answer 2 for my own somewhat unusual use case - "scientific workstations". The two biggest criteria for me are availability of packages and hassle-free system administration. I went from Red Hat/Fedora to Debian because of the bigger package count at Debian. I went from Debian to Gentoo because the Debian folks were pushing the useless GNU Java over Sun's and a lot of the software I wanted to run collapsed in a ragged heap with GNU Java. And I left Gentoo for openSUSE mostly to get away from the time-consuming re-compiles. -- Twitter: http://twitter.com/znmeb Computational Journalism Server http://j.mp/compjournoserver Data is the new coal - abundant, dirty and difficult to mine. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org