Ben Rosenberg wrote:

* Sid Boyce (sboyce@blueyonder.co.uk) [030918 22:52]:

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So a two hour turn around on OpenSSH wasn't good enough? I can say your never going to get the blood red bleeding edge stuff out of SuSE..it just won't happen. SuSE just isn't into that sort of thing. This would be why they patched OpenSSH 3.5p1 instead of just making 3.7.1p1 packages and letting the chips fall where they may. They know that things break and that us long time SLE'ers get REALLY pissed off when 1000's of emails come through with blah, blah and blah is broken. So they do try to keep that to a minimum. Thank God.

Fine if you are just using your box as an appliance, but if you want to make use of quite a few updated and special applications, then things can go totally doolally

Well, I can say categorically that I don't use my computer as an appliance since I regularly play Quake3Arena, UT and other games. I use it for Office related tasks (swriter, scalc..etc) and for quite a few other tasks but I also know that upgrading without testing is a foolish road to go down. SuSE has a policy of not breaking dependencies..so if say something like a new version of OpenSSL comes out because a bug or exploit was found then they will patch the existing version rather then introduce that unknown into the equation and have to recompiled things such as ALL of the KDE components that depend on ssl support among other things. Some of us use our computers for work and have no time to play around fixing this or that or some other thing because one block in the pyramid has been changed to make the whole thing unstable.

And again, if you "feel the need to bleed" compile it yourself or go to one of the MANY sites that have SuSE packages or contact me off list if you can't make it work and I'll give you my rate for RTFMing the INSTALL files and knowing how things work so that I can get a pkg built.

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Just do what I do..compile the src yourself and make rpm's. :)

Try doing that to scribus-1.1.0, it runs, but doesn't allow you to type anything alpha or numeric into a text box.

Well, I'm sorry that you couldn't build Scribus. And I'm sorry it didn't let you type anything. I went looking at their site and I found "Latest Developers Release: 1.1.0". So your complaining that an unstable development version wouldn't behave correctly. Don't be silly and don't complain about something that's marked unstable and for developers. If your not testing it and reporting bugs or not working on it code wise then this should be a hint it's not for end users and might not behave all that well. I don't bitch when an unstable release screws up. I'm using a nightly from a few days ago of Firebird and ya know what ..earlier today it didn't like some PHP on a page..it grabbed all the RAM and all the swap an locked the machine up tight as a drum. Did I complain..a little...but I didn't get that upset that I had to hit the power button. After all it was a "nightly, unstable release" an thems the breaks.

The last changelog entry for Scribus BTW is 06.09.2003 so the 1.1.0 tarball of source would probably be from this date or around it. If you want to truly get involved then pull from CVS ..the bugs that afflicted your build may have been cured. Just as the build I was using of Firebird that was built on Mozilla 1.5a had many things fixed in the nightly from 09/17 which is build on Mozilla 1.5b.

I was mainly venting things I hope SuSE should get a grip on and I did say 8.2 was a vast improvement on earlier releases as far as currency of the software and I hope it wasn't a one off exercise. Mandrake and debian also had similar complaints. I don't quit that easily, needless to say, it compiles and works flawlessly on Mandrake 91 as it does on my SuSE 8.2 PIII 700 laptop. Version 1.0.1 from Lenz site allows numerics and special characters only. A friend has the SuSE 8.2 CD version running fine, but it doesn't here. We've found that we can install a SuSE distro on his machine and mine, then we'll have different problems - he has a PIII and I an Athlon, both with GEForce 4 cards, could be how the hardware handles things.

You have to understand that I don't say the things I say to make you run screaming away from SuSE, but to warn you that the SuSE/German mentality seems to be stability first..feature second. A lot of us long time SuSE users like this and are very use to it. If you want newer versions of packages that SuSE hasn't felt the need to upgrade then you can visit such sites as packman's, usr-local-bin or funktronics. These sites have new builds and "version numbers" then some of the SuSE software. You could even just grab apt and add these directories to your sources.list and you'll get the updates automatically when you run the "update then upgrade". What I've said is quite simply how it is and SuSE isn't going to change to supporting unstable developer releases...they simply don't have the resources to do it nor do they want to do it.

I do use usr-local-bin etc., but they have gaps also, I don't see FlightGear 0.9.2 up anywhere. I reckon all software is unstable, that's why new releases are issued. There have been issues with kernels, apps, etc., NVidia-4496 e.g though there is an update HOWTO supplied on the SuSE site, gcc. More often than not the bugs in earlier software are fixed satisfactorily - that's why 8.2 has been a significant improvement over other releases. We need to air perceived shortcomings in the hope that our beloved distro will improve, better than keeping quiet until it boils over and be met by "NOBODY EVER SAID".

And one small request. Please do not CC me. I've been on this list for about 5.5 years and if you send to the list. I'm dead positive I'll get it. An one more thing..when you indent your paragraphs like that..it makes it awfully hard to read..it's not needed.

Request granted. Hmmmmmmmmm... some say indentation helps. Regards Sid.... Long time SuSE user by choice.