Marcus Meissner wrote:
I am angry the same way you are, being the security guy who has to use this framework :/
I should explain, and maybe this is an issue with language, but when I say "you", I mean you "collectively", not you personally. I don't know about German, but I know some languages use different words for these two, unfortunately, English does not. So when I said "you", I was referring to SuSE collectively. Honestly, I did not know what your position was. Though, I will take this opportunity to congratulate you on the great work on the security side of things. I've always liked the SuSE security model, and with AppArmor, I do believe that SuSE 10.1 strikes the best balance between security and usability of any distro in the world.
The problem is that there is no one good to blame, since all can be explained by rational decisions in the end.
- We needed to change and enhance the package handling. mostly for multiple repositories, the easy ability to have add-on products, integration of the "update" mechanism with the regular package manager.
Why were apt and smart rejected? Both are mature systems that provide this functionality.
- We needed to incorporate ZEN to have a concise remote management solution for SLE, our large customers just want this.
Let me suggest, then, that you have zen be an OPTION, for those environments that use it, rather than the default.
It was also an attempt to bring ZEN internally closer to YAST.
Instead, it broke yast.
It worked to some degree, but there are problems to be worked out.
It plain *did not work* at release. It has since been patched to mostly function, but honestly, not tinkering is going to fix this abomination.
- Timing :/ We could not delay until it was as (quality) ready as we would have liked it, mostly we could not delay SUSE Linux any longer
Why not simply ship 10.1 with the old YOU, then? I don't understand why zen/rug was required to be in 10.1, since it obviously wasn't ready. Why not simply wait for 10.2 or SLES 10? I think this is one of our greatest fears as sysadmins. We're really worried that Novell considers OpenSuSE to be a beta-test dumping ground for SLES, much like Fedora is for RedHat. There are thousands of people like me, sysadmins that work for small IT shops or underfunded departments of larger ones. We're the ones that brought linux into the corporate world through the back door. We don't have the budget for SLES/SLED yearly contract commitments. This is especially true since many of us are looking to Xen virtual machines, or have already begun to implement them. If we have to look at every OpenSuSE release with suspicion: "What did Novell break on this release?", we'll switch to another distro.