On Sat, Sep 21, 2002 at 08:36:40PM +0000, SI Reasoning wrote: > I've said this before... but I'll say it again... > Rushing a release to meet a schedule, instead of releasing when fully stable, ends > up hurting the distro in the long run. With Redhat, Sun, Lindows, Xandros and a host > of others now focusing on the desktop (of which Mandrake has been the leader until > now) means that extra scrutiny will be placed on this release. If things don't work > out of the box, many people will wipe it and try Redhat, etc. The tolerance for > outstanding bugs will be much lower for a while. Since Mandrake plans on this being > the last of the 6 month release schedule, I think getting it just right before > release becomes even more important.
At some point in time you have to call it done. 9.0 seems to me to be the most polished Mandrake release ever. Everyone else is playing catch up. And they are all using the same software. So if Mandrake has an issue with this guy's mouse everyone else is likely too. Without instructions on how to replicate his issue or an error showing why the kernel doesn't think that device is present on his system it will be very difficult to fix. All bugs are fixable with limitless time and money. Most bugs are not fixable with the time, money and information available. This is a reality of software development for end users. Especially when doing software development for a wide variety of hardware that you can't possibly have access to all of it. This is especially true for bugs related to specific hardware (as his seems to be since nobody else seems to be reporting the same bug). Unlike the Windows world where the hardware manufacturers provide their hardware to Microsoft to do verification that it works right. The Linux world doesn't have that. Instead users have to put a degree of effort into figuring out why their hardware isn't working. And this is certainly not a different situation for any of the other Linux distributors. -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org Never take no as an answer from someone who isn't authorized to say yes.
