Re: Debian desktop -situation, proposals for discussion and change. Users point of view.
(Please don't CC me on list mail.)
On 16-May-07, 01:58 (CDT), "Mgr. Peter Tuharsky" <tuharsky@misbb.sk> wrote:
> Steve Greenland wrote / nap?sal(a):
>
> As I illustreted, "rock solid" is not automatically guaranteed by
> oldness of software or by length of pre-release testing.
And as others have pointed out, the purpose of stable is to minimize
disruptions. For many users, living with known bugs with known workarounds
is a *lot* better than identifying new bugs.
> We could start with programs that don't other programs depend on much.
> For example, what is the purpose of using 2 years old Firefox,
> Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org and other such stand-alone programs? They
> could be flawlessly upgraded during stable release life cycle.
Sigh. No, they can't. For one thing, it's not just Iceweasel, it's all
the plugins and extensions that might be in use, *and* any external
software or libraries that those extensions use. Not to mention all the
other software that uses iceweasel libraries. Additionally, any internal
webapps have to be validated against the new iceweasel. Internal macros
need to be validated against the new OO.org. It's a lot of work. Quite
a bit of it cannot be done by Debian, because it's site specific. I
had a client for which getting a simple patch (1 or 2 lines of code)
installed on their production server took literally > month, because of
their testing requirements and minimal scheduled downtimes. Getting a
completely new version installed took much longer.
Now, that may be of little relevance to the home user. But I know some
such users who also *don't* like upgrades, because they're happy with
what they have and don't need to change. For example, my father-in-law
just this year went from Mac OS9 to OSX, mostly because his hardware
was dying. So he hadn't upgraded in >6 *years*, and didn't feel he was
missing anything. There's quite a few of those people out there.
Steve
--
Steve Greenland
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
world. -- seen on the net
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