Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
On 2008-01-27T20:56:27, Alexey Eremenko <al4321@gmail.com> wrote:
So let's sum it up: It is _very_ unlikely, that Novell will help with producing/maintaining openSUSE LTS, so the main question is: are we strong enough community to handle that task?
I'm non-developer, but I'm willing to assist with BETA-testing (which is even more important for LTS releases, than non-LTS ones).
Are there any _developers or maintainers_, that want to handle this difficult, time consuming task?
I've read through this all, and I think you're heading down the wrong path, even though it's well-worn.
LTS, or what is commercially called "Enterprise" distros, are a PITA. They avoid change. That makes them brittle, unflexible and costly. Have you ever heard a management trainer advocate "Manage to avoid change"? No? Ask yourself why.
What you want, what you _really_ want even if you don't know it, is fluid, painless change.
You don't want frozen distros. You want everything to continue working with the newest code. What people _really_ want are perfectly smooth upgrades.
This whole Enterprise stuff forces Linux into the mould left by dinosaurs, such as AIX and VMS. They confuse "stability" with "unchanging".
You will also find that the same people who want "unchanging" distributions want them to run on the newest hardware at top speed, while providing all the latest features. How people fail to not see the paradox here has always amazed me.
Don't fall into that trap. We do it because it brings in cash, not because it makes anyone particularly happy.
As long as you think change == bad, you'll fail and suffer.
I agree 100%. My main disappointment with the change from SuSE Pro to openSUSE is that because openSuSE is a loss-leader, the money isn't there to keep enough people on payroll to make sure that each release is as stable as it should be. SusE Pro 9.3 and each of the previous releases (6.x and up) were very stable products. 10.0 introduced "upgrades" what weren't ready for prime time. In November, 2006, I installed 10.1, hoping it would be an improvement. Instead, YOU (Yast Online Updater) didn't work. I re-installed 2 weeks later. Since I was in Baghdad in the middle of a war zone, writing up a bug report was just about last on my list of then current priorities in life. Reading the list, I see all kinds of nonsense concerned with fiddling with the look and feel of YaST... but if the doggone thing isn't working properly, this is no more beneficial than re-arranging the deck chairs on the RMS Titanic, when the hull has been breached, and bulkheads don't reach the ceilings. I'm still reading on this list complaints of basic functionality which used to work, and are now broken, and they're not getting fixed. I'd be more than happy to pay a reasonable price (along the lines of SuSE Pro) for the hiring of the staff to allow problems like this to get fixed. Another problem ... without your retail version, the local computer (a nation-wide chain named Micro-Center store no longer has ANY sign Linux on the shelves). Congratulations -- by ending SuSE Pro and SuSE Desktop, Novell and SuSE have dropped from a position offering minimal existance in the awareness of the uninitiated to one of complete non-existance. This is NOT the path to increasing the size of the user base. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org