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SubjectRe: What is up with Redhat 7.0?

On Mon, 2 Oct 2000 21:40:59 -0400, tytso@mit.edu <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> Why didn't the package maintainer issue a formal release, if they really
> thought it was the best thing for RedHat to be using

Perhaps you're getting Redhat confused with Debian here. Redhat doesn't
have package maintainers. It has 1,000 monkeys at 1,000 typewriters
recreating the works of Shakespeare, a la "it was the best of times, it
was the blurst of times"

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.

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.

That, combined with the fact they somehow managed to get a hold of
certain key kernel developers so stable linux kernel developments by
their competitors don't get integrated into the stable kernel (eg,
reiserfs & a better VM for 2.2, both sponsored in part or full by SuSE)
really ticks me off as a person who cares more about a quality, useful
Linux in general and not about generation of revenue for shareholders at
the expense of all else.

I'm not surprised Redhat 7.0 is full of bugs, everybody should know by
now that you have to wait for 7.2 so the SuSE and Debian guys have time
to fix some of the bugs in the initial release. BUGTRAQ is usually hard
to ignore...

Oh yeah, I posted these and a few other concerns not really worth
repeating to this list for topic/breveties sake, to the appropriate
channels @redhat three years ago and, surprise surprise, was ignored
just like every other legitimate bug report or compalint. Maybe a
public post when an obvious outcome of their problems they haven't
addresed over this time becomes headlines might spur someone into action
over there. I'd really really hate to see Redhat go under, which is the
ultimate eventuality I feel if they continue down this course. Redhat
do a lot of good things in other areas which is good for Linux as a
whole. Unfortunately quality isn't one of them, neither is support.
Erik, Bob, Mike.. guys.. please fix. For many people Redhat == Linux
and we need to show that Linux == great, not Linux == mediocre. Make
use of the community, eg Linuxcare might be a good choice to outsource
support to so you can forget about that bit to some extent and
concentrate on other bits. Just some suggestions, I'm trying to be
constructive :)

Cheers,

--
Matt (speaking for myself, not my company)

PS: Yes, Alan, I'm a paranoid loon, just like the many many other
paranoid loons who have observed exactly the same things, said it out of
concern for you and the other usually good guys there, and get
labelled...
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