Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: stable? quality assurance? | From | Valdis.Kletnieks@vt ... | Date | Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:57:33 -0400 |
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On Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:42:32 +0300, Alexey Dobriyan said: > On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Marcin Letyns <mletyns@gmail.com> wrote: > > Last time I tried freebsd it wasn't stable. It had problems with my hard > > drive controler. > > This thread needs more anecdotal evidence.
To be fair, the continual re-appearance of this thread is *always* anecdotal.
It's always somebody who has trouble getting it to work on *their* hardware, or with *their* software, and insisting that stuff doesn't get shipped unless it works properly on everything. Apparently, having it work on 99.997% of the gear out there isn't good enough for them. Then there's the inevitable call for "no shipping with blocker bugs" - never with a good objective definition of what constitutes a "blocker" bug.
Ted had it right - you insist on fixing *everything*, you end up with Debian Obsolete. It's the nature of the beast - you *will* detect regressions at something resembling an exponential-decay curve. The only question that remains is how close to zero it has to decay before the ship date - and there's no single answer for that which fits everybody. One point to note is that if you ship earlier, the decay rate increases because of wider deployment. As a result, it's quite probable that you get to some objective level of "stable" faster by releasing early and then releasing a half-dozen dot releases, instead of waiting for the 3 or 4 dozen people testing it before release to shake out all the bugs (which obviously won't happen due to things like access to hardware). [unhandled content-type:application/pgp-signature] | |