And this exactly illustrates the problem with the current development model. Come hell or high water the product WILL ship, even if it turns out to be the buggiest ever. Mandrake and other distributors are entering a period where they are merely replicating proprietary vendors by becoming slaves of a ship date and shipping the whole unfinished mess out for consumers to choke on.On Wed, 5 Mar 2003 16:57:17 -0600 Texstar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Why is a mid-March release so critical?
To quote Civileme:
...Mandrakesoft has to make the release date. It is negotiated into contracts for pressing CDs, for example, and a day's slippage may cause a month's delay and extensive penalties. That is one of the realities of making this software. The only thing that would stop the release date is a showstopper bug that
keeps the product from working on a significant number of computers...
One may debate whether existing bugs qualify as "showstopper bugs", but point is the release date is important because Mandrake has contractual obligations that have financial consequences if violated.
Miark
That is why it is time to change the development model. Development should be modularized, with each major compenent following a separate development path maintained in sync with the external free software developers. These components should be folded into the distribution ONLY when bulletproof while the distribution itself gets released periodically. This would decentrallize the development of the distribution and sharpen quality control. It would also focus resources on the problems rather than on continuing to persue enhancements at the expenses of stability. A big part of the problem is that Cooker spends most of its life as a mish mash of incomplete and buggy code and then ends up in a big rush to stabalize everything simultaneously as time runs out. Releasing a distro with the current flow of complaints on bugzilla is nuts. But then, as before, I wil somehow make it work by regressing various components backward to previous versions in order to come up with a better functioning whole.
