----- Original Message ----- From: "David Rankin"
To: "Martin Deppe" Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 12:27 PM Subject: Re: [SLE] SuSE 9.2 not quite fully cooked? Unfortunately,
This is the normal side effect, growing pains, whatever you want to call it..., of applying the corporate model to an open source project. I have lived the very painful experience of the Mandrake transition which is what led to my latest server running Suse. Hopefully, Suse will take note of the Mandrake experience and of all the former Mandrake users on this list to avoid the same alienation of its base.
The sole culprit is usually the race to release version (number next) for $ reasons. That inevitably leads to versions released before they are ready, containing small, but crippling bugs that causes newbies to just give up. To Mandrake's credit, things are getting better. But the days of mdk 8.1, 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 10 were dark days indeed with candid comments from long time user of "better wait for the next release before considering applying the latest release to a production machine." Suse would do well to avoid this reputation.
As far as Suse is concerned, the 9.2 release in the midst of the Novell transition -- the jury is still out. The 2.6.8 kernel itself posed challenges for this release that, granted, a little additional time would have helped smooth out. But, all in all, I think the true litmus test will be how we do with Suse's release number next. When Novell bought word perfect, the 6.0 release was terrible and everyone howled. But the 6.1 release was a thing of beauty. So I remain cautiously optimistic.
Mandrake 9.2, 10.0 and now 10.1 are fine, I've not seen any problems
David Rankin wrote: there. SuSE 9.2 is I hope, a temporary aboration, it'd better be. The bean counters always demand on-budget and on time, the heck with the quality and full speed on the road to ruin. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer =====LINUX ONLY USED HERE=====