Well I found the priority documentation at http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs/Definitions#Bug_Severities, it seems quite good, so further to below, I feel we should not be releasing a distro with any outstanding job having a criticality over Normal. Obviously there would be exceptions, but it seems that we do indeed release a distro with 'Major' severity outstanding calls correct? So by proxy that would be saying that we're OK releasing a distro that has "Major loss of function"? Q

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Quentin Jackson 09/23/08 11:28 AM >>> Regarding the question below, "What do you propose to do for this?"

I think the following is true: If a distribution has bugs of a major or annoying nature etc it will either be because of resource, time or management or resource and time (and possibly more than one of those). I expect there is nothing we can do about the quantitiy of the resources we have, at least nothing we can count on, we also cannot make people spend a certain amount of time on something even though we do have to have deadlines. What we probably can do is look at the time we need to get a quality distribution out based on past experiences. But, before we can do that, we need to define what quality is. Once we've defined what quality is, we probably need to look at our priorities, ie Blocker, Major, Critical etc and clearly define what type of faults fit into each of these categories and what bug categories will be allowed to remain unresolved at go-live time. Someone (more than one) needs to be assigned to recategorise these bugs to where they need to be (especially but not limited to times nearer to go-live) to avoid the inevitable customer logging something incorrectly. My feeling is that we may need to decrease the frequency of which a distro is released in order to maintain this quality, for the work that is done, 6 months is fast! What do you think? Along the right track? How much of this is already in place? Thanks, Q

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Andreas Jaeger 09/17/08 7:59 PM >>> "Quentin Jackson" writes:

I think we all agree SLE is for the enterprise, hence it's name, and you are bang on regarding hardware support, Novell have 90% of the solution right, but when your wireless card won't run it kinda makes it impossible to continue if you rely on it. Obviously I don't expect every flavour to be supported for the enterprise but..... Novell could support the big brand corporate/workstation models via vendor agreement to maintain a loyal customer base of their target market - corporates! Who wants an OS that might not work in a few months when your company is forced to change hardware due to EOL? Only those really trying to say something with Open Source I expect which is not whom we're trying to bring over.

I wanted to Beta test SLE 11 as I'd like to go back to it and be able to recommend it to the enterprise again, but they turned me down, odd considering how much more pro-active I was in selling their software

Speaking about your hardware example: We have backported to SLED10 SP2 many wireless drivers. than any other vendor in NZ. Oh well, that's Novell I suppose. No wonder all their offices here have closed down. Our partner betas can only take a limited number of users. It might be that the person doing the decision did not know about your experience.

But back on topic :) My question re OpenSuSE is not to suggest that it should run in the enterprise but that it will run in the home / enthusiest market, which then if stable could potentially be used in business if it got a good name for itself. If it doesn't achieve this, what's the point of the distro? Presently as I'm sure everyone here is aware, we never know exactly how good an OpenSuSE release is until we uninstall our current one, format, install, re-install etc which is a major pain so unfortunatley we can't trust that things will work as we would like. In my opinino this is a major probe> truly serious about OpenSuSE if we can't trust that there's been a regulated effort to get found bugs / problems out.

What do you propose to do for this?

For example, what's our philosophy on allowing a version to be released with a network manager that doesn't work properly such as OpenSuSE 11.0? I know it would have delayed the release to get that right, but what's the cost of not getting it right? It seems to me we may end up getting a bad rep and be setting the wrong example if things like that continue to happen. I even heard one of the Novell guys say one time that the whole reason SLE 10 was delayed so much was to get theOpenSuSE bugs out since it's made from the same code

The way you state it is bullshit. ;-) SLE10 was late because of the package stack and some other areas, openSUSE was hurt by it the same way and not the reason.

initially. So I guess the question is can we afford to have such a rigid release cycle such as what we currently do and what justifies an extension? Do we need to re-address some of the rules about releases and their schedules? Perhaps this is what is happening right now with the delay of 11.1 alpha 3? Do we have a philosophy stating we are not so concerned about this stuff as we are an enthusiast distro?

Alpha3 was not delayed, it was cancelled since it was uninstallable.

Lots of questions, it would be great to get some answers. :)

Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform / openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-testing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-testing+help@opensuse.org