-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2009-04-01 at 17:42 -0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
I'd like this post to go to the project list, where the right audience is, but I leave that to you.
Feel free to send along to whomever you feel is appropriate - I'm not subscribed to the project list myself; as a new user (I see it is on gmane and am adding it to my list now), I wouldn't want to seem presumptuous on that list to come in and start off with this message. :-)
Ah, then, we'll leave it for some other time :-)
Yes, I agree that big issues should be "repaired" on the same distro version, but I don't know if there are enough resources for that. Currently we have to wait for the next release to solve that, which usually means that a new set of bugs will be "released" too. At the end, we just have to choose which set of bugs we can live with, and choose the corresponding suse release.
Certainly, but again I would point back at the common argument that the community is bigger than Microsoft's development workforce as an advantage - this statement would seem to contradict the assertion that one of the benefits of OSS is that it's a community effort instead of a relative handful of software developers.
The community is big, but surely, bugs have to be handled by the maintainer, or somebody with that kind of knowledge. I can't, for instance. I can report bugs, do complicated tests, perhaps some scripts, but that's about all. Ah, yes, I do part of the translation to Spanish. I can't "repair" bugs.
Currently, I'm staying with 11.0 because there are bugs in 11.1 that impede me upgrading. The main one was that beagle exercised some functionality in reiserfs that was broken and caused the kernel to crash. This has been repaired with the last kernel update, but alas! now my machine does not fully suspend to disk because it doesn't power off at the last moment - and as this feature is part of my work routine, I can't live without it, so, --> no upgrade.
Interesting - another reason to consider disabling beagle. I have mentioned before that I use beagle on occasion, and I find the idea good (and it generally works for me), but the implementation does leave something to be desired (and I'm sure plenty on this list would say "at least!", so let's not reignite that old discussion, please. ;-) )
Actually, beagle was the "good guy" here, or at least, not the culprit. Let me find a metaphor.... like tightening a big, rusty, nut with a nice tool made of soft steel: the tool is damaged. It is not the fault of the nut, but of the tool. Same here: it was the reiserfilesystem which was at fault, beagle simply used a function that was there, but faulty, unknown to all. In the great scheme of things, it was a good thing that beagle provoked the fault so that it could be cleared. Meaning, it could have happened with some other program.
At the same time, there are features in 11.0 that are broken: for instance, writing to an external HD via USB, formatted as reiserfs, is badly broken, which means that I have to boot 10.3 or 11.1 to do my saving.
Weird, I have an external USB drive on my x86_64 system that is reiserfs and seems to work OK. I even export it over NFS. Is there a bug that I should be looking at that talks about this issue?
Maybe only 32bit systems are affected, or there is something special in my hardware. No idea. It is bug 460020, if you are curious.
Or, another is that mounting LUKS encrypted, reiserfs formatted, read-only media (DVD) is broken because the kernel tries to _write_ on the dvd. Another one that is broken, is that writing big files to an XFS, encrypted, filesystem crashes the system.
I consider all those big issues... but I have no hope of seeing any of them solved soon. Not in 11.0, perhaps not even in 11.1. Those things have been appearing over the last 2 years, they are slowly deteriorating. I expect things that work to keep working... but it is not the case, things are breaking and they are not solved.
I understand your frustration - as you probably guessed. At the same time, though, these particular issues would seem to affect even potentially a small group of users. Things like zypper creating huge log files potentially affect everyone - or boost breaking encfs (encfs has some popularity from what I've seen).
True. But it seems that users of 11.0 are not usually affected by this huge log issue :-? The encfs trouble I haven't seen myself, I don't use it.
I understand the need to prioritise the issues and work on the most serious ones, and fully support that of course....
That's right. But what preoccupies me, is that things that should be rock solid, as the filesystem, are not so solid. I found some "holes", there are probably more, lurking there. That scares me a lot: just imagine we bump into something that destroys data in big chunks, the nightmare! My troubles might then be just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe some effort should be given to do a... full review? of the entire filesystem code, specially the lest used ones. Sharks could be lurking there. I guess that a lot of patches are going on bits over here or there, and that the code is becoming "unclean". It is a feeling, I don't know how to explain it. I hope to be wrong.
Effort seem to concentrate on highly visible features, like kde4.
...but things like KDE4 (which, like it or not, for 11.0 was something of a disaster from a PR standpoint at the very least) do distract from things that affect all users. KDE4 issues don't affect me because I'm a GNOME user. Core issues in KDE4, though, are best addressed IMHO by the KDE team and not the openSUSE team. The encfs/boost issue is a packaging/ build issue for the distro. KDE4's usability problems aren't, so I'd consider that a different class of issue to be addressed by a different group of people.
Correct. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAknTstkACgkQtTMYHG2NR9URTgCePqXp8w7aXeDY5b1WW1FK8U0P SwUAn3wgdE7HPZDBuVZ4vZNY3uin5n7q =Kvga -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org