On Wednesday 05 March 2003 14:37, Jason Komar wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 15:22, John van Spaandonk wrote:
> > And me
> >
> > On Wednesday 05 March 2003 22:40, N Smethurst wrote:
> > > I realise that I am a relative minnow here, but I nevertheless wish to
> > > express my agreement with Tim. I'm glad someone has expressed what I
> > > hesitated to say.
> > >
> > > Le Mercredi 5 Mars 2003 22:07, Timothy R. Butler a écrit :
> > > > Is it worth risking Mandrake's future as a whole to get this
> > > > distribution out by mid-March? I just don't personally see that as a
> > > > realistic date when I'm using RC2. Mandrake developers are amazing
> > > > people, but I still can't believe all of these problems can be fixed
> > > > in just nine days. To me, RC2 seems more like a beta release and not
> > > > a release candidate.
>
> I am in full agreement as well. The quality of the release is paramount.
> Mandrake has a reputation of being a good distro. for people who want to
> switch from Windows. Those people expect it to work out of the box with
> a minimum of bugs.
I think this is also important for those who switch from other distros. I've
managed to convince a good number of RedHat, SUSE, and even a few gentoo and
debian users that Mandrake makes more sense for them. The library policy
("You mean I can have both versions of XXX at the same time without
force-installing and manually moving files around? Well, I guess I can use
RPM after all!"), the up-to-dateness and completeness of Cooker contribs and
PLF ("I spent weeks trying to get my Win32 AVI codecs working under SUSE!"),
urpmi, 586 builds, etc. are the features that convince them. But when they
try it out, the first comments I get are always things like, "Wow, I didn't
know KDE looked this spiffy!" or "The installer figured out the DHCP for my
LAN/cable modem/etc. automatically, and downloaded updates even before I got
in and tweaked everything manually!"
The problems people are reporting will be just as bad for these kinds of users
as for Windows users trying linux for the first time.
However, that being said, I'm not convinced these problems can't be fixed in
time for a release. We're talking about a small number of bugs that, while
serious in their effects, appear to be small enough to knock out in a week.
For example, the fact that the browser starts up with no homepage is pretty
terrible--but it's just a matter of changing the default homepage from the
indexhtml-9.0 location to the indexhtml-9.1 location.
The kernel/driver issues are bigger, but if worst comes to worst, the kernel
can always be rolled back, can't it? I remember being given a choice between
two different 2.0 kernels in a linuxppc distro, because the newer one didn't
work on some hardware. Would it be so terrible if you got a message saying,
"kernel 2.4.21 may have problems with some of your hardware; OK to install
2.4.19 instead?"
Meanwhile, Paul Dorman's idea of "sub-distributions" is interesting, but I
think there's a better solution:
Provide, in addition to the 3-CD distribution, a "mini" version that provides
just enough to get you up and running and install other packages. You could
download, say, a 150MB ISO for English, or a 180MB ISO for some other
language (if there were people interested in maintaining a mini-distro for
that language), instead of 2GB with everything. You'd have a basic KDE
desktop only, everything needed to get on a LAN or cable/DSL connection, all
of the packaging tools, the core development packages, and some of the
setup/configuration tools, but few applications, no servers, etc.
Then, provide an easy way to pull in groups of packages. Each of the groups
you can choose in the installer would be available, and would install the
exact same packages--except that it would only have to download the
appropriate language, and it would download the most up-to-date version, from
the mirror you chose.
Even simpler, you could allow running that tool as part of the installation
process.
An alternative solution is the way linuxppc used to work a few years back. You
download and burn an 80MB ISO that contains the installer, which can grab
packages off a mirror instead of off a CD. (In fact, I never even burned the
CD; they provided MacOS-based and linux-based installer bootstraps so you
could just leave the .iso file at the root of an HFS or ext2 partition; that
was nifty.) Making this fool-proof is difficult, but making it work 95% is
easy--and good enough for the intended audience: people who know Mandrake,
know what they want, and have broadband connections.
I think either would provide everything Paul's looking for, and be very easy
to put together. In fact, making a mini-distro out of the full 9.1 is
something a single user could easily do shortly after 9.1 is released.
By the way, as things are today, you can just download CD 1, install a
bare-minimum configuration, then rpmdrake/urpmi all the packages you want off
the net. 650MB is still pretty big, but it's a lot less than 2GB.
