Re: [Sheflug] Suse 7

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "ps" == Paul Sims <wulfie [at] wulfric7.co.uk> writes:

    ps> I don't dispute there are behind the scenes
    ps> improvements/changes, but a jump from 6.7 to 7 implies
    ps> something major (to a simple minded fool like me anyhow), and

It's not simple-minded; it is simply based on a particular point of
view.  Valid, but not the only one.

    ps> since 2.4 & kde 2 are around the corner maybe 6.5 would have
    ps> been a better designation

Huh.  But 2.4 and KDE 2 aren't SuSE products, and there's no
particular reason to suppose that they will actually arrive and be
reliable, AND be supported by reliable upgrades to all the associated
products (graphics apps, modutils, PCMCIA/USB/IrDA drivers, etc, etc)
in the time frame that SuSE wants to release in.  2.4?  Debian still
distributes 2.0 kernels and I saw a Linux 1.3 box out on the net (in
service as a Web server) the other day.  In fact, I dunno about
SuSE's record, but with the exception of Debian---famously slow to
market---all of the other major distros have hosed themselves by
releasing a major version of their distribution concurrently with a
major version bump in an important component (kernel, X11, etc).  It
takes a long time (months) before the bugs in such large systems work
themselves out.

Or have you been reading too much Eric Raymond?  Microsoft is not
incompetent, and now that OSS is a big business with a big product,
it's going to have the same kinds of version skew and reintegration
problems that Windows is famous for.  OSS helps, a lot, but it is not
a silver bullet, and OSS vendors do not yet have the kind of resources
that Microsoft spends on reliability (yes, they do, despite the
conventional wisdom that they don't give an IP fragment for
quality).

BTW, not using the SuSE product I can't say what they've accomplished,
but as a Debian user who must deal with two very different languages
daily, and often simultaneously, I would certainly assess working
I18N, consistent across most applications, as worth a bump from 2.x to
3.0.  But Americans and most Europeans would never notice.  So should
they bump or not?  Depends on who they want to signal with the version
change.

Furthermore, if the behind the scenes improvements and standards
changes impact third-party developers significantly I would say that's
worth a major version bump, whether end-users ever notice or not.

Finally, a major version change is often used to signal that "legacy"
versions will receive lower priority in support.  Of course we don't
like that, but on the other hand upgrading a Linux distribution is
cheaper and easier than upgrading anything else I can think of.

Certainly users should look at the user-visible features, and make
decisions based on those.  And I would certainly consider the
reliability of the vendor in question if they continuously change
version numbers to "keep up with the Intels" (obviously I don't mean
the clone chips).  I'm sure SuSE will take your opinions into account.
But that doesn't mean they don't have good and sufficient reason,
besides version number rivalry, to make a version bump now.

In fact, being able to sync version numbers to user expectations is
one reason for splitting the product.  (Not sufficient, IMHO.)

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