On Wednesday 21 November 2007 10:31:25 pm Stephan Binner wrote:
On Thursday 22 November 2007 03:53:58 Rajko M. wrote:
The problem with alpha, beta naming is real. People are afraid to install test versions.
You don't "fix" that by calling something "Release Candidate".
People fears can be fixed, or created with words, that is fact of life. In this particlar case fears are associated to words and uncertainty what they mean. There is no real definition of alpha, beta and RC in openSUSE ie. what developers can and will change in each of stages. It is plain counter productive to test stuff that can break system in Beta stage, and absolutely not good in RC stage. That kind of problems should be solved during Alpha. Having blocker in RC should never happen, unless blocker is consdiered important application (OpenOffice) crash. The effect of blockers in late testing stage we can see now when people don't start massive downloads before GM. Next iteration will be that most of users will wait for remastered media, and after that fails there will be no more users. If somebody think that it will go in different way let me know what observation are used to get to such conslusion. Mine is based on perceived load on servers, users questions and statements in miscellaneous 'suse' related communication media, so not quite accurate.
In the case of 10.3, the Beta releases were imho usable. Most major problems were reported and fixed. Sadly some people started to test only when it was in "Release Candidate" state (note the difference to just calling it that) and expected new reports to get fixed when only blocker fixes were allowed.
Sincerely I had lesser problems with Alphas than later. When RC allows only blocker fixes, instead of polishing product, then development process seems to be upside down.
In the case of KDE 4.0, nobody tested/used it as daily desktop environment (in opposite to runing a single application) during the Beta releases. One observation was that people who participated in the KDE2 or KDE3 beta testing completely missed the KDE4 beta cycle (because it was as desktop environment unusable until recently). Why not just continue to have 2 or 3 months Betas?
Unusable desktop is a problem, but problem is also calling KDE4 RC and than later explaining that base technology and desktop are not at the same development level. For me and proably another 99% of users KDE and KDE4 is a single item. I can't use base technology without desktop, and explanation helps me to stop complaining, but still whole is not in better shape than worse of 2. One major problem for me as a user is that I know about KDE very little comparing to X, kernel and some other stuff. It was just working all the time and now when I have trouble even to start KDE4 session, I'm in the middle of nowhere. Looking on KDE4 site I can't find instructions how it starts and how components interact, and I can't experiment on component level. -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org