Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 3 Oct 2000 16:56:48 +1100 | From | Matthew Hawkins <> | Subject | Re: What is up with Redhat 7.0? |
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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... - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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