Kind request: fix your packages

[Sean Middleditch]

On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 11:33, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le dim 05/10/2003 à 17:15, Sean Middleditch a écrit :
> 
> > Because when people want software, they want it *now*.  If you tell
> > them, "well, you have to wait two months to install that software, even
> > tho the software it already out now" then they're going to (rightly)
> > switch to an OS that doesn't suffer from a complete lack of backward or
> > forward compatibility.
> 
> I can assure you the time between a release being dogfoodable and it
> hitting the end-users disks is much more than two months for those other
> OSs.

But they never have to wait to install new software, and older software
just works.  Even if behind the scenes its ugly as hell, which
definitely sucks for developers, the users don't really care.  ;-)

> 
> Two months is quite acceptable for a beta period. In fact it's quite
> fast - why do you thing Oracle and friends were screaming at RedHat for
> a slower release cycle ?

Yes, that's great if we're talking an OS release.  I'm not, tho - I'm
talking uers who want to install some piece of software right now, and
don't want to be told they have to wait 2 months for a new version of
their OS to come out; not when "other" OSs can run apps from 10 years
ago, and even the newest apps coming out still run on at least several
releases back, which covers a decent number of years (so far as
computers go).

Fedora doesn't have to slow down releases, nor does it have to stop
being cutting edge - it just has to make sure necessary dependencies are
*available* (not necessarily installed, if the user doesn't need them)
to cover at least a somewhat acceptable number of years of backwards
compatibility.

There's also the commercial software people try to release, which can't
make use of the "crap, a month went by and a new OS is out, we need to
recompile!" and offer 67 RPMs slightly-different on their install CD for
users.  The way things are now, that software *does* ship all of their
dependencies embedded, *even when they shouldn't*, because the OSs don't
provide them; plus the software almost always uses shell scripts and
other hacks that no user should *ever* need to use just to install
something.  But, they don't have much choice, at the moment.

> 
> Regards,
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.