Agreed, but if nobody uses the software as it is supposed to be used,
bugs will never be found and there is no reason for the project to
exist.
The developers need to grow up, and fix the bugs rather than make
excuses. I once had a boss who had a saying relevant to the way
many developers act on this list:
Excuses are for losers! A real man steps up when called and does
whatever it takes to get the job done right, and on time.
I was 13 and had shown up 10 minutes late for a job picking rocks
out of a field. It was tough job, and I was never late again but
by the end of the summer I had earned the respect and responsibility
to operate tandem-axle trucks, front-end loaders and large tractors.
I continue to have a strong work ethic and strive to do what ever
it takes to get the job done properly and on time.
First of all, I don't see developers making excuses. They're
rationalizing what needs to be done as to what the orgininal poster had
done. Calling Fedora bleeding edge software isn't an excuse to not do
any work on it, it's a good reason to make sure that a) you exhaust all
resources before complaining about it, and b) you submit a legitimate
bug report. What the original poster has done, it appears, is
immediately post to multiple threads complaining that a piece of
software is broken and that no one should use it. If you're going to use
ANY release of Fedora, don't take this attitude. Yes, some bug reports
get over looked, but a majority get assigned and taken care of. If you
encounter a problem, you're not helping yourself or the community by
yelling "Abandon ship!" before taking any steps to work through these
problems (I understand that the original poster worked on one major
problem, his issue with video drivers, but I didn't see him say he tried
anything else to work with his other problems and he didn't really post
much information that's usefull for anyone to assist him with).
As for your reference to your job when you were younger, I've had a
similar experience in autobody/automechanics work that I did for several
years. I don't think that applies here, because a) this is primarily a
community list, b) alot of the dev's for things that the original poster
complained about don't exactly get paid to do their dev work, and c) the
fedora devs have been getting their job on time by testing things to the
extent that they could privately, and then releasing for major tests to
the general public. If Fedora devs had to test every piece of software
(I'm not talking about something like GCC here, I mean more along the
lines of MajorDomo and whatnot) then the development cycle would be much
longer than it already is. They could do it, but that's not what Fedora
is here for. Fedora is here to have a fast dev cycle OS that can prepare
major and minor bugfixes for a "stable release" OS, and still provide
users with a decent open-source operating system. If you're using Fedora
Core, and you're expecting a completely stable, 100% complete, total
server solution package, then you're really using the wrong
distrobution. That isn't the purpose of this distro.
And if you're going to say that the devs are just being lazy, then why
don't you complain about Knoppix? "those devs obviously don't care about
making a distro that's robust with multiple Windows Managers that can be
used to run servers. they must be lazy." (excuse me for the quote there,
I'm trying to sum up some of the dissent in this thread in a simple
quote that could be made towards another distro, no one here has
actually said this). No, those dev's made knoppix the way it is for a
reason. I'm not saying that Fedora devs are trying to make Fedora buggy,
but they've got a development cycle they have to stick to and they've
got bugs to iron out that they can't do without community support, which
is something the original poster was apparently missing the point of.
I've successfully setup and run Fedora core 4 for two weeks now on three
systems: 2 dell power edge servers (833MHz PIII, 2GB RAM, RAID5), and a
650MHz desktop machine with 256MB RAM. One of the Dell's I upgraded, the
other was a fresh install. If I run into bugs, I post them in bugzilla.
Haven't run into any issues with Fedora Core 4 yet though. I also use
debian, slackware, and gentoo.
--joseph
