matthew@topic.com.au (Matthew Hawkins) wrote on 03.10.00 in <20001003165648.E21048@matty.tsa>:
> One reason I stopped running and recommending Redhat was the inferior
> quality of their packages. They'd ship half-complete, half-assed
> packages and it was concerned end-users who'd have to make their own
> RPMS and kindly make them available to the world, to fix the irritating
> stupid bugs in the default Redhat ones. Of course, some enlightened
> Redhat employee will no doubt tell me I should register bug reports
> about their packages through official channels blah blah blah which is
> no use when you do that and the bug reports are ignored for over six
> months while Redhat are off promoting themselves at one conference or
> another, arse-kissing for more shareholders while at the other end
> screwing over the people that put them into the position they could IPO
> in in the first place. There's noone responsible for a package, unlike
> Debian (the other extreme) where each package has a maintainer who is
> responsible for making sure that package is reliable, security-conscious
> and integrates well into the rest of the system. With RH you just
> submit bug reports to some tracking system and three revisions down the
> track somebody will get back from self-promotion at whatever conference
> and go "damn, there's a lot of bug reports, I might look at one or two
> then delete the rest" and maybe your bug is one of the lucky two, so you
> and the millions of other Redhat users don't have to manually fix it
> next time.
Nice rant.
Unfortunately, a lot of it is equally applicable to Debian. Well, not the
IPO stuff, of course, but Debian does have some bugs in the bug tracking
system that are several years old (as is easy to verify for anyone who
cares at http://bugs.debian.org/). There's a reason we're talking abou how
it would be nice to get from 10,000 bugs down to 8,000 for the next
release.
> That might not be quite how it works now (and for their sake, I hope
> not), but it sure looks that way from the outside, from the eyes of a
> former loyal customer.
Well, one difference with Debian is that most of our dirty underwear is
publicly available, so instead of dreaming up scenarios about how we all
go around self-promoting on conferences to look good for the next IPO, you
can see how we spend the time insulting each other for not caring about
<insert favourite topic here - free software, package quality, whatever>.
MfG Kai
kai@debian.org
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