For what it's worth, I quite like the philosophy of Rasterman, the author of Enlightenment. Enlightenment's at about v0.16 at the moment. When I asked Raster "When's v1.0 coming out?", his reply was "When I've finished coding everything I can think of and want to do, and don't want to touch the thing any longer." Works for me :) Drew On Sun, Jun 04, 2000 at 02:44:41PM -0700, Mike Markley wrote: > I agree that putting unusable software into the stable distribution is a Bad > Idea(tm) but that's what the BTS and the freeze exist for. A whole lot of > free software spends a long time in pre-1.0 stages. In the commercial arena, > we have beta test programs and whatnot to eliminate the need for pre-1.0 > public releases, but it doesn't work that way for free software - in fact, > none of my packages are even at 1.0 yet and I find them extremely usable. > I've been using GIMP for various things since well before 1.0 as well. We > can't apply the same anti-beta senisibilities to free software since the > average free software developer doesn't have the resources to get a bunch of > beta testers to bang on it before a public release. If a package is > unusable, an RC bug will be filed. If it is not fixed by the time that > distribution freezes and hits its first bug horizon, it simply won't be in > stable. We already have quality control mechanisms in place to prevent the > distribution of unusable packages in stable (it is there, I don't want to > re-open the "shorter release cycle" can of worms in this thread), and free > software to some degree has always been about getting Joe Blow to test it > out for us. If it's unusable, file a bug and as long as it remains that way > it won't go into stable. If it's perfectly usable, as so many pre-1.0 > packages are, then don't sweat it. Or at least that's my POV. -- PGP public key intermittently available at http://strider.ucdavis.edu/~drew/drewskey.txt
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