On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 20:09, Timothy Murphy wrote: > I find this word "stable" generally heralds some silly remark. > Surely Fedora-2 is meant to work as is? > And if it doesn't then there is a bug, > which should be fixed as soon as possible. > You shouldn't excuse bugs by saying "Fedora is not stable". > > In my view, Fedora-(n+1) should work at least as well as Fedora-n > on all systems, > and if an "improvement" is known not to work on some machines > it should be eschewed. ---- let me see now... new kernel version new X server a stated goal for fedora "It is also a proving ground for new technology" and you expect it to work at least as well as the previous version on all systems or it should be eschewed. Let me suggest that those who are frustrated with their perception of the quality of the FC-2 release familiarize themselves with the 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' by Eric Raymond. I will quote a little snippet "Here, I think, is the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect. In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena -- or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door." --- thus, releasing imperfect software is part and parcel of the open source world. My understanding is that Windows XP was released with 14,000 known bugs. If you want to read Eric Raymond's treatise... <http://www.redhat.com/knowledgebase/otherwhitepapers/whitepaper_cathedral.html> There are some who curse the darkness and some who light candles... Craig
