-----Original Message----- From: suse@rio.vg [mailto:suse@rio.vg] Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 10:39 AM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] KDE updates 10.1
This ties back to that "disconnect". The vibe I'm getting from you and others with @suse.de's is that SuSE Linux is now development software like Fedora and not intended for production machines. I suppose if you hang out on the development lists where broken or buggy services are par for the course, you might forget that many of us depend on SuSE Linux to run our businesses.
My confidence in depending on SuSE to run production servers has been shaken. I was planning on rolling out a new set of Xen servers with SuSE 10.1, but I've had to put that on hold. So far, SuSE has done nothing to recover my confidence.
You would use an OS that's been in release for two weeks in a production environment? While I agree that it's nice to have the latest and greatest, the desire for stability generally suggests that a "waiting period" is a Good Thing. That holds whether you're talking about SuSE, SuSE-OSS, SLES, Windows Server, etc etc etc. Once the software is in release, stick it on a test system, see how it works...if it doesn't work, then back-burner it until the problems are fixed, and then test again. Wash, rinse, repeat :-) (An example: I've got Windows running on most corporate desktops, because of a particular piece of software that our vendor only provides for Win32. We've started talking about looking into Windows Vista -- in late 2007/early 2008, when it will have been out for a year or so. And we run SuSE 9.3 as our production OS, having been burned by a too-early jump to SuSE 9.0 and the problems that resulted from the "upgrade" to 9.1.) I agree with the general sentiment, that adding in the ZENWorks updater to this release was a mistake. As a Systems guy, if my programmers tried to dump a feature like that into a release as late in the product cycle as this was added, I'd throw a bit of a temper tantrum. And I think someone from Novell/SuSE's project management group should go back and look at the decision process that lead to its inclusion. But if the complaint is that you can't just take a brand-new release and dump it into a production environment, well...maybe it's time to get a _bit_ more conservative with your own release cycle :-) -- there's always going to be a bug in there somewhere... - Ian