On Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:57:40 +0200, Martin Schlander wrote:
Onsdag den 1. april 2009 20:50:52 skrev PGNet:
there needs to be some middle ground found for project "support" (however that ends up being defined) other that "Go buy SLES/D ..."
openSUSE provides security fixes and fixes for major bugs for 24 months.
That's better than Fedora (~12 months), Mandriva (~12 months) _and_ Ubuntu (18 months, non-lts).
Even for Debian it's only 30 months (assuming the 18 month release cycle is followed successfully, which it of course never is.). And for Ubuntu LTS it's only on 36 months on desktops.
I think you miss my point here, Martin. It's not about the stated support timeframe. It's about the perception - a perception backed by my own experiences in trying to get issues affecting my systems fixed.
I think this area - the level of support for openSUSE - is one of the areas where openSUSE is really strong, therefore demanding more seems a bit unrealistic. And developers wasting time on old stuff, takes away resources from doing useful things with current stuff.
"Demanding" is a little strong. I was commenting on the *perception* that it seems to take a bit of pressure to get patches backported. Take the encfs/boost example. That issue was discovered and reported when 11.0 wasn't "old stuff" - 11.1 was still in development. The gsynaptics bug I also comment on was discovered pre-11.1 (and come to think, I don't know that the fixes from 11.1 did get backported, as my touchpad on my D620 still doesn't work right because I can't disable circular scrolling). Even when reported, the fix was "upgrade to 11.1 pre-release because the fix is committed there and won't be in 11.0". I do not mean *any* disrespect to the team at all. Please understand that - I am generally VERY happy with openSUSE. But it seems that too often, I see suggestions in various venues (such as OSF and the users mailing list) to upgrade the OS (a major undertaking - and I run 11.0 currently on 6 different systems here at home), and then the response to "well, I'm not ready to do that" is "if you want professional support, move to SLE". I'm not asking for professional support; quite frankly, I prefer the community support model - having participated as a recipient, a provider, and a leader (in the Novell forums) - to be generally higher quality than paid professional support. As I said in the users list, I'm a user and thus part of this community. I can't contribute code because I don't trust myself to write good enough code (nor, maybe more importantly, do I have the time), but I can contribute in other ways by helping test and reporting when I see what I think is a problem, either with processes or with the software itself. There is always room for improvement in processes. But if nobody is willing to say "hey, this could be better", then we don't get the perspectives needed to find out how things could be improved. I want openSUSE to continue to be the best distribution out there (and I *do* think it's the best one I've worked with). Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org