Re: A user perspective

   Too frequent releases is a support problem.  "What version are you
running" becomes a difficult question to answer.  Also, the time it
takes to do a full release, with documentation, binaries for all
the operating systems, etc... takes a long time and distracts
developers from doing actual developement.  An additional
problem, and one that is made much worse if you add alot more
committers, is that alot of those snapshots aren't going to work,
or have parts of them that are in-flux.  I for one, find it disconcerting
that distributions are taking snapshots from CVS - who knows what
transient bugs they are picking up.  At least the official releases
are supposed to be working correctly.  No such guarantee can be made
for the snapshots.


			Mark.


On Sat, 22 Mar 2003, dan carpenter wrote:

> I think a fork of XFree86 would hurt the Open Source world, but doing nothing 
> would hurt even worse.  From my perspective as a user, even though Keith 
> Packard's solution might not be ideal (no solution is perfect), the issues he 
> raises are valid and have been problems for some time.
> 
> The easiest issue to address is #3:  "Slow release schedules".
> Why can't CVS just be released every other week with an announcement on 
> LinuxToday?  Over 7000 people from LinuxToday read the changelog from linux 
> 2.5.65 and some of them tested it out and gave feedback.  Others just saw the 
> headline but even that is enough to show that the project is alive and the 
> developers are active.
> 
> I started working on the kernel because of almost every day I would see a new 
> kernel changelog on LinuxToday.  Some days Alan Cox would release two kernels 
> on the same day.  It seemed like a very exciting project to work on.
> 
> The current situation with XFree86 could be turned into a PR coup if the 
> BoD admitted that a problem exists and told the community what changes they 
> were going to implement to move forward.
> 
> Respectfully,
> Dan Carpenter
> A concerned user
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