On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 11:42, Togan Muftuoglu wrote:
* Frederic Soulier;
on 25 May, 2004 wrote: On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 10:32, Simon Oliver wrote:
Coming from distros with a really open development process I'm a bit puzzled by the SuSE way... - Novell opens up SuSE bugzilla, invites community to beta test future releases (ala Mandrake/Fedora) and sets up a development web site & wiki WOULD BE really nice :) (in time for 9.2 would be cool)
SuSE is not Fedora or Mandrake look at Redhat which had open betas and ISO downloads. At the end, RedHat said fine and initiated the Fedora project where people can play with the new code zilla the bugs however RedHat turn into a closed beta system concentrationg on the core business.
Agreed. I find the Mandrake way to be a real bazaar! (maybe too much emphasis on the community and not enough on the business) and the Fedora way to be the opposite. I guess there is a middle ground to be found here.
IMHO SuSE way of doing the beta test and limiting the bugzilla access to a few is better way of quality control. When beta test is open to the general public then resources can be spent on bugzilla entries which are not actual bugs or posts of questions which are not relevant to beta purposes.
Except when you have a pbm, want to report the pbm and you don't have a clear way to do it. Subsequent to that it's frustrating to not know whether your pbm is being worked on or not.
I strongly believe SUSE should keep the beta procedure as it is now, not that I am involved with the beta test but now I have better understanding of the German way of doing business which is based on technology.
I also like the emphasis on the technology and the no-nonsense approach to making a distro from SuSE yet in the open source ecosystem one benefits hugely from the participation of the community. As long as there is a process to drive inputs from the community and the community is not driving the business then it should be fine. Opening the beta to more people is a good way to have access to a variety of hardware which I'm sure SuSE does not have in-house :) Having said that Novell is a big American company, Ximian is totally focused on Gnome, Evolution (+ connector) and Mono. SuSE is a European company (mostly german) and focused on KDE so I hope everybody will play nicely ;)
From what I heard there's already a strong commitment from Novell to Evolution 2.0 + connector and Mono. How is this going to impact Kontact, Kmail and the mostly KDE centric SuSE is an interesting thought. Answers in ~6 months I suppose.
/Fred