WARNING:DO NOT UPGRADE TO CORE 4

[Joseph Green]

>Agreed, but if nobody uses the software as it is supposed to be used, 
>bugs will never be found and there is no reason for the project to 
>exist.
>
>The developers need to grow up, and fix the bugs rather than make 
>excuses. I once had a boss who had a saying relevant to the way 
>many developers act on this list:
>Excuses are for losers! A real man steps up when called and does 
>whatever it takes to get the job done right, and on time.
>
>I was 13 and had shown up 10 minutes late for a job picking rocks 
>out of a field. It was tough job, and I was never late again but 
>by the end of the summer I had earned the respect and responsibility
>to operate tandem-axle trucks, front-end loaders and large tractors.
>I continue to have a strong work ethic and strive to do what ever 
>it takes to get the job done properly and on time.
>
>  
>
First of all, I don't see developers making excuses. They're 
rationalizing what needs to be done as to what the orgininal poster had 
done. Calling Fedora bleeding edge software isn't an excuse to not do 
any work on it, it's a good reason to make sure that a) you exhaust all 
resources before complaining about it, and b) you submit a legitimate 
bug report. What the original poster has done, it appears, is 
immediately post to multiple threads complaining that a piece of 
software is broken and that no one should use it. If you're going to use 
ANY release of Fedora, don't take this attitude. Yes, some bug reports 
get over looked, but a majority get assigned and taken care of. If you 
encounter a problem, you're not helping yourself or the community by 
yelling "Abandon ship!" before taking any steps to work through these 
problems (I understand that the original poster worked on one major 
problem, his issue with video drivers, but I didn't see him say he tried 
anything else to work with his other problems and he didn't really post 
much information that's usefull for anyone to assist him with).

As for your reference to your job when you were younger, I've had a 
similar experience in autobody/automechanics work that I did for several 
years. I don't think that applies here, because a) this is primarily a 
community list, b) alot of the dev's for things that the original poster 
complained about don't exactly get paid to do their dev work, and c) the 
fedora devs have been getting their job on time by testing things to the 
extent that they could privately, and then releasing for major tests to 
the general public. If Fedora devs had to test every piece of software 
(I'm not talking about something like GCC here, I mean more along the 
lines of MajorDomo and whatnot) then the development cycle would be much 
longer than it already is. They could do it, but that's not what Fedora 
is here for. Fedora is here to have a fast dev cycle OS that can prepare 
major and minor bugfixes for a "stable release" OS, and still provide 
users with a decent open-source operating system. If you're using Fedora 
Core, and you're expecting a completely stable, 100% complete, total 
server solution package, then you're really using the wrong 
distrobution. That isn't the purpose of this distro.

And if you're going to say that the devs are just being lazy, then why 
don't you complain about Knoppix? "those devs obviously don't care about 
making a distro that's robust with multiple Windows Managers that can be 
used to run servers. they must be lazy." (excuse me for the quote there, 
I'm trying to sum up some of the dissent in this thread in a simple 
quote that could be made towards another distro, no one here has 
actually said this). No, those dev's made knoppix the way it is for a 
reason. I'm not saying that Fedora devs are trying to make Fedora buggy, 
but they've got a development cycle they have to stick to and they've 
got bugs to iron out that they can't do without community support, which 
is something the original poster was apparently missing the point of.

I've successfully setup and run Fedora core 4 for two weeks now on three 
systems: 2 dell power edge servers (833MHz PIII, 2GB RAM, RAID5), and a 
650MHz desktop machine with 256MB RAM. One of the Dell's I upgraded, the 
other was a fresh install. If I run into bugs, I post them in bugzilla. 
Haven't run into any issues with Fedora Core 4 yet though. I also use 
debian, slackware, and gentoo.

--joseph