On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 10:47:13AM -0700, Monte Milanuk wrote:
I'v used these distro's that do the public beta program. Mandrake has a very active developer community, w/ a rapidly changing beta/development version of their distro, i.e. 'cooker'. Anyone who wants can contribute, and if it works, it generally gets kept. But as far as I'm concerned, there is no comparison btwn the overall stability of SuSE 6.4 and Mandrake 7.0/7.1. At least on my systems, they were flaky as all get out. Plus everyone throws a hissy fit every time a buggy package comes out of RedHat, so I don't think they are such good example of the merits of a beta program. Debian is about the only one I've used that has a reasonably effective beta program, but they aren't as much a commercial entity as companies like SuSE and RedHat, etc. Thus they (the Debian community) are a lot more forgiving of delays. Would you like it if you had to wait as long for 7.1 as its been btwn Debian 2.1 and 2.2? I wouldn't.
There is one difference. Red Hat does not have the community that SuSE does. I used Red Hat for a good while before I switched to SuSE, and I don't think that anyone on their mailing lists bothered to beta test any of the packages from rawhide. SuSE users, IMHO, tend to be a little more dedicated.
All in all, I think SuSE does a pretty reasonable job of testing things in house, and I'm not convinced that a public beta would gain them much from a purely technical standpoint. I do think it would gain some more user support, though how much is questionable.
I agree that SuSE does a good job whith their in-house testing. However, I don't see how a short 1 or 2 week public beta test period could not help. Victor -- "Let's get it straight: copyright infringement is not piracy. No one wears eye patches and cries 'Aargh!' as they download the latest Britney Spears..." -------------------------------------------------- As posted on Slashdot by Gilroy, August 8, 2000 -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq