Marlier, Ian wrote:

You would use an OS that's been in release for two weeks in a production environment?

While I agree that it's nice to have the latest and greatest, the desire for stability generally suggests that a "waiting period" is a Good Thing. That holds whether you're talking about SuSE, SuSE-OSS, SLES, Windows Server, etc etc etc. Once the software is in release, stick it on a test system, see how it works...if it doesn't work, then back-burner it until the problems are fixed, and then test again. Wash, rinse, repeat :-)

Unfortunately, every release of SuSE is on a clock. Two years until updates stop. That's a mighty impetus to use the latest release. And, frankly, the problems with the updating system in 10.1 go well beyond a couple of minor bugs. And I _have_ backburnered it. I was hoping that as a .1 release, it would be like 10.0 (which I hadn't put on any production servers), but with the rough edges cleared up and some newer versions... you know, like what one would expect out of a x.1 release...

I agree with the general sentiment, that adding in the ZENWorks updater to this release was a mistake. As a Systems guy, if my programmers tried to dump a feature like that into a release as late in the product cycle as this was added, I'd throw a bit of a temper tantrum. And I think someone from Novell/SuSE's project management group should go back and look at the decision process that lead to its inclusion.

It's not that they added ZenWorks... it's that they completely trashed what was already working before that baffles me. Surely someone might have suggested, with a change of this magnitude, that you have one release where both systems work?

But if the complaint is that you can't just take a brand-new release and dump it into a production environment, well...maybe it's time to get a _bit_ more conservative with your own release cycle :-) -- there's always going to be a bug in there somewhere...

The complaint is that the new system is quite well broken, and SuSE doesn't seem to much care... If you read their comments, it's all as if this were just a minor bug that nobody should really care about, to be discussed on the development lists and looked at for improvement in a later version... Add on top of that a community that is already wary of Novell leaning on SuSE, and you've got a major problem. It certainly smells like a Novell exec demanding that ZenWorks be included in 10.1 at a late date in some sort of attempt to increase ZenWorks Suite sales... this is what many of us have been worried about. Combing through the IRC and developer lists, they say the advantage of the new system is that it can deal with "programs and patterns", not just packages. I'm not entirely certain what they're referring to, but I know it does break delta rpms (which worked before), and it sounds like that isn't going to be changed any time soon. I know it also takes up far more time and resources to accomplish what was otherwise a simple procedure previously. Speed is listed as a feature for a newer version of it sometime in the future. What other bombs are lurking in ZMD that haven't come to the fore yet? I've seen zen-updater delete a package without checking if anything depended on that package. Will rug do the same? What is SuSE's policy on development vs. production software these days?