RE: [Fwd: Re: [Cooker] Frustration]

[Torrey Hoffman]

(Posted from my corporate Windows machine because mail from my 
Mandrake / Evolution personal account is silently rejected by 
the cooker list... Why?  ARRRGH.)

I also submitted some serious bug reports before RC1.  As they 
never showed up on the mailing list I eventually sent them 
directly to Pixel and Warley.  Of the 4 bugs I found (two 
serious) I only got a response regarding one of the minor 
cosmetic bugs in the installer.   I appreciate the work that 
Mandrake does - I've paid my $60 to join the club - but this is
not acceptable.  

If the reason was the hurry to get 8.2 out, well, the solution 
would be to NOT RUSH THE RELEASE.

For the record, here are the two serious bugs again.  My original 
bug reports were MUCH more detailed, but what's the 
point now...

1. The Beta 4 kernel hangs at Detecting Partitions when it 
reaches my 120 GB Maxtor drive, which has a single 120GB 
ReiserFS primary partition.  This prevents installation.  I can 
work around this by unplugging that drive during installation, 
compiling and installing my own kernel from kernel.org, and then 
reconnecting the drive, rebooting, and editing /etc/fstab... I 
can do all that in my sleep, but Joe Average User sure couldn't.

2.  On a machine with two sound cards, a Sound Blaster Live! and 
an M-Audio Audiophile 2496, the (Beta 4) Mandrake installer 
correctly identifies both cards and sort of sets up sound.  
Unfortunately, NEITHER sound card works in the resulting 
configuration.  Nothing works - no mixers, no sound playback, no 
ALSA apps, nada.

Again, fixed by upgrading to a custom-compiled 2.4.18 + ALSA 0.9 - 
now both sound cards work.  Again - I can do this but average user 
sure can't.

These are serious bugs and I got NO response about them.

I hope these bugs were fixed for release. I downloaded and burned 
RC1 just to test but ran out of time, as 8.2 was released so 
quickly.  What's the rush?  It just doesn't make sense to have a 
release candidate out for less than two weeks!  Volunteer testers 
like me, working on our own time need several days to download and 
burn the ISOs and run our tests, it is very discouraging to be 
part way through this and then find out there is no point, 8.2 is 
being released anyway.  Bah.  

I was hoping that 8.2 would be the first Linux distribution that I 
could just install and run on all my machines, but it looks like 
once again, I will have to start from 8.2 and then update the 
kernel, ALSA, and who knows how many other things before it will 
be usable.  Sigh.

What was the rush for 8.2 release???  I still haven't seen a good 
explanation of that.

Disappointed...

Torrey Hoffman
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [Fwd: Re: [Cooker] Frustration]

[David Barker]

I'd have thought it was fairly obvious why the releases have to be rushed 
out - as soon as it's announced that a product it going into beta phase, who 
in their right mind would buy the old, out dated release??! fairly few I'd 
imagine... There isn't an OS out there that can afford to hang around 
squashing all the bugs (well, apart from slackware, and do we really want to 
move to their 2 yr dev cycle and let mdk go bankrupt in the mean time? ;) 
Financially for mandrake, it would be a disaster to leave it much longer... 

8.2 is already one of the most stable mdk distro's ever (a hard feat for a 
distro that prides itself on being bleeding edge) - and in the coming weeks, 
it's only going to get better as the last few bugs are fixed.  With 
rpmdrake now doing updates through proxies, it's also relatively idiot proof 
to keep a machine upto date now 

I'm guessing in maybe a month or two, a freq will be released, and that'll be 
the 8.x line closed off with a super stable distro - you could ask why didn't 
they wait, but if we're really honest about it, i doubt that many people are 
going to notice the last few bugs (as shown by how silent the cook list has 
been for the last few days...)  

On Tuesday 19 March 2002 1:25 am, you wrote:
 (Posted from my corporate Windows machine because mail from my
 Mandrake / Evolution personal account is silently rejected by
 the cooker list... Why?  ARRRGH.)

~snip~
ws how many other things before it will
 be usable.  Sigh.

 What was the rush for 8.2 release???  I still haven't seen a good
 explanation of that.

 Disappointed...

 Torrey Hoffman
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]