On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 05:31:11PM -1000, Warren Togami wrote: > >Considering all of the problems that FC 2 has been having, I wonder if > >Redhat would consider changing the published schedule so that a version of > > This is an untrue and unfair statement. The truth of the matter is FC2 > ON THE AVERAGE is far more stable and greatly improved over FC1. There Perhaps true there, but not true here. Almost every system I've installed FC2 on has been a source of problems so far. I believe that "almost" means 6 out of 7 have problems. One of my personal favorites is ext3 journal errors on about 4 out of 7 systems. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make sense out of the symptoms enough to even say what is wrong so it can be filed in bugzilla and possibly fixed. I'm really not complaining: as far as I'm concerned, this is my problem to deal with. If I can get to the point where I can make a meaningful bug report, I will. I'm just saying that for some people, apparently, FC2 has been a near disaster. Claiming that it isn't true, because it isn't true for everyone, or anyone you know, won't change the fact. It looks like the some of the people who are having problems are having huge problems, from reading this list. I do personally believe that the development process, which was to include user testing, didn't work very well. I know I tried to be a part of it, and failed. I only realized that one of the problems that was in the release had started in test 2 or test 3 (can't remember which), but the symptoms weren't clear enough to me to say that it was software rather than hardware until way too late. I only realized it was software when it started failing the same way on multiple computers for a particular configuration (LVM on top of RAID1) during the release installation. ncurses isn't even working right. That was certainly noted early in development. It was said that the problem was in users of ncurses, as I understood it. That's nice. But I still can't use a bunch of keys on the keyboard any more in Mutt, because I haven't had time to fix it myself. I hope someone is evaluating the process that is being used to produce Fedora. It looks like it needs some changes before it can be considered workable. That is one of the frustrations, though: the "community" does not seem to be very involved in that evaluation, if it is happening. In fact, "we" don't even know if it is happening or not. I didn't know when I installed FC1 that the switch to an early version of Linux 2.6 was going to happen. Linux has a history of servious problems with a newly released kernel. This one seems to be better than some of the previous ones, but it looks like it has some problems that make it hard for some configurations, as usual. to use. If anyone had asked me what I thought (I know, big deal), I would have recommended against it, Linus personally requesting it or not. Making all this stuff work together is hard. I installed FC1 because I was tired of doing it myself. Up until then, all our systems were entirely home brew, without a distribution, based on my personal efforts. I ran out of time for this "hobby," and finally admitted it was just that: a hobby I didn't have time for any more. I don't want to complain or yell. I just hope that someone is taking the time to look at the process and make sure it is working, based on feedback. I get a very strong impression that a lot of the people involved are saying it is working, and not paying a lot of attention to feedback that there is some part of it is that is not working. This impression may be entirely wrong. But it does bring up how well the "community" is being communicated with, since I'm not the only one with this impression. By the way: taking the statement "if it's not in bugzilla it doesn't exist" too far is ridiculous. I can understand it meaning that complaining that it isn't getting attention because it wasn't put into an automated system is stupid. But it is just as stupid to actually believe that it doesn't therefore exist. Some users of our software often don't tell us about bugs. When we find out, we don't tell them the bug doesn't exist. We just ask them to tell us about it next time, and not just "grin and bear it." We don't want them to grin and bear it. We want to fix it. I assume the attitude is the same around here. But it is hard to tell that from that very self-righteous statement. I do understand that the duties of a user of not paid for software is different from software that is purchased with money. Our experience with users is that they really aren't very good at providing descriptions of what happened when they found a bug. I've certainly found that difficult with some of the problems I've had with FC2. I hope this is useful. Perhaps not.
