On Thu, Jun 01, 2000 at 04:31:52PM -0700, Riyad Kalla wrote:
> installation I've always within 10 minutes encountered segfaults of utility
> software, or misconfigurations, or endless lists of errors being printed out
I've never had any problems with Mandrake. OK, there was one time when it would
crash (complete crash) every couple of hours. That's what I get for trying
beta bioses from Abit... :)
> I hear people have their fair shares of complaints ). One thing that I see
> as the cause to this is the incredibly quick development cycle mandrake goes
There's another thing: Mandrake has a lot more newbies than other distros. If
you get Debian or Slackware, chances are you know what you're doing. So you'll
configure your system yourself, not blame the distro in general for non-distro bugs,
etc.
That last thing is an important note. When I have wonkiness with Samba on my
network that includes Win2000, I know that the fault is with Samba, not Mandrake.
(well, I really know that the fault is Win2000, not Samba; their only "fault" is that
they hadn't finished it yet. And since I don't know enough about networking to
submit a patch to fix it, I'm certainly not blaming them)
> from it. I really feel a longer devel cycle, EVEN if you are just sitting on
> the product and releasing betas, gives you an incredibly stable product just
> through the process of elimination. I kinda of equate the difference of what
> long cycle of betas can do to the Quake3 release cycle and the Ultima 9
> release cycle.
Ick. There is no comparison that can be made with Ultima 9. I'm a longtime
member of the UDIC and Ultima fanatic; the faults in U9 go *far* beyond their
release cycle.
> But I digress, it was ugly, and could have been totally avoided. What are
> the developer's thoughts on the shorter devel cycle of Mandrake? Is this by
> choice, or is it out of excitment and want to be "ahead of the curve" that
> the releases are made?
Mandrake has a habit of pushing technology; for example, Reiser FS isn't in the
official kernels yet.
I think that Mandrake is positioned fairly well. It's not for everybody, I
acknowledge that. But I don't think that any one distro *can* be for everybody.
Compare Mandrake with Debian. Definite difference there; I think that Debian
has the longest test cycle. And they certainly have a stable product. OTOH,
they don't have as recent packages.
There are a few things they could do to improve Mandrake, of course. But I
don't think that they should try to appeal to everybody. Decide where Mandrake
stands in relation to other Linux distros, and stick to that. If it means
sacrificing some stability in order to include newer software, do so.
--
This is my sig. I shall insert something witty here soon.
