Difference between Debian and other flavours of Linux

[David Fletcher]

At 14:33 24/04/2006, you wrote:

>That's fine if that's what you want; distributions like this exist -
>CentOS for example. These distributions do, by their very nature, lag
>behind the "leading edge". *Someone" has to be at the leading edge in
>order for problems to get resolved, and there's a fine line to be drawn
>between being too close to that point that the distribution is highly
>unstable and difficult to use (perhaps this might apply to rawhide) and
>being too far behind the leading edge that people are wanting widely
>available new bits of software that aren't deemed stable enough yet to
>be included.
>
>Given the popularity of Fedora and the roughly equal numbers of people
>clamouring for new releases of KDE/Gnome etc. and complaining about
>instability, my gut feel is that the balance is about right.
>
>Paul.
>
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If I could add my 2 small currency units worth to this, I think 
Fedora is great, but in my so far very limited experience of 
submitting reports to bugzilla, fixes are much slower than I was 
expecting. In fact, so far nothing that I've submitted has yet been fixed.

Take bug number 186766. This was opened on 26th March although the 
problem is a lot older than this. It has been looked at by Jindrich 
Novy, who has decided to reassign the bug to a kernel issue. That was 
five days ago and nothing appears to have happened since. Or perhaps 
someone is silently working on a fix. I just don't know. It would be 
nice if the person assigned to the bug could send a progress report 
even if it were just "I'm working on it" or "It's next in the queue".

Take bug number 178847. This is my first attempt at making a 
contribution to Fedora Core. As I have tried to make a contribution 
to the project I feel I have at least some right to make these 
complaints. The bug is a RFE, opened on 24th January, with the 
intention of helping new converts from the Dark Side through the 
first important but confusing it seems stages of installing Fedora 
for the first time. Three months on, my work is hidden away somewhere 
in the wiki rather than on public view in the iso downloads folder 
where it would be of some considerable use.

Now that I've started using FC5, I have of course discovered other 
faults with it including another USB issue.

So to sum up what I think I want to say about it, the concept of 
Fedora Core is great, but I really can't recommend it to any of my 
friends or family who are less experienced computer users than me 
until I can feel confident that bugs get addressed reasonably 
promptly, which includes feedback from developers/maintainers to the 
bug reporter.

Dave F