FC2 Issues

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 20:09, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> I find this word "stable" generally heralds some silly remark.
> Surely Fedora-2 is meant to work as is?
> And if it doesn't then there is a bug, 
> which should be fixed as soon as possible.
> You shouldn't excuse bugs by saying "Fedora is not stable".
> 
> In my view, Fedora-(n+1) should work at least as well as Fedora-n
> on all systems,
> and if an "improvement" is known not to work on some machines
> it should be eschewed.
----
let me see now...
new kernel version
new X server
a stated goal for fedora "It is also a proving ground for new
technology"

and you expect it to work at least as well as the previous version on
all systems or it should be eschewed.

Let me suggest that those who are frustrated with their perception of
the quality of the FC-2 release familiarize themselves with the
'Cathedral and the Bazaar' by Eric Raymond. 

I will quote a little snippet

"Here, I think, is the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder
and bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs
and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes
months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you've
winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the
inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect.

In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are
generally shallow phenomena -- or, at least, that they turn shallow
pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on
every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get
more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose
if an occasional botch gets out the door."

---

thus, releasing imperfect software is part and parcel of the open source
world. My understanding is that Windows XP was released with 14,000
known bugs.

If you want to read Eric Raymond's treatise...
<http://www.redhat.com/knowledgebase/otherwhitepapers/whitepaper_cathedral.html>

There are some who curse the darkness and some who light candles...

Craig