Re: What are the community's goals for 2.0? [was Re: Getting serious about releasing]

[Alex Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On 24 Apr 2002, Luis Villa wrote:

> We have two options right now:
> 
> 	(1) a 2.0.0 that has no major, individually embarassing bugs, 	but a
> huge collection of bugs that make the overall level of quality
> 	embarassing, but it Works For Us.
> 
> 	(2) waiting and having a 2.0.0 that is completely free of highly
> 	embarassing bugs and has a very small number of bad bugs. It 	Works For
> People Who Are Not Us.


I think this is a highly biased description of our options. Let me give 
you the opposite view (note: It's not my personal belief that either of 
these views are correct). 

We have to options right now:

(1) a 2.0.0 that has no major, individually embarrasing bugs, is basically 
stable but has a large collection of small bugs (many of which were even 
in Gnome 1.4). A user can use this desktop and mostly get his work done.

(2) We postpone 2.0.0 indefinately, waiting for "all the bugs to get 
fixed". But nobody is interested in working on the boring blocker bugs 
(after all, gweather was broken since 1.0, why should I care about it 
now). We slowly slip our release dates, eventually past the next Mandrake 
(insert random distro here) internal feature freeze date. They take a look 
at gnome 1.4 (latest stable), compare it to KDE 3.1 (KDE is good at doing 
regular stable releases), laugh and decide to drop gnome support. After 
the firste distro drops gnome everyone else soon follows suit. No users 
see the new gnome code, so everyone assumes it's a stagnant project. Gnome 
becomes a footnote in the annals of history. RIP.

See the difference? 

Anyway. Personally I don't think May 22 is quite possible. And I'm willing 
to delay it a bit to stableize the release. But I strongly belive that we 
must be punting feature requests, drop broken features that nobody is 
actively fixing, and punt non-crasher bugs in non-critical components.

Not delivering a stable release can hurt us very badly. Remember, there 
will be more releases. This one doesn't have to be everything to everyone.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a globe-trotting dishevelled cat burglar searching for his wife's true 
killer. She's a cosmopolitan tempestuous lawyer in the witness protection 
program. They fight crime! 

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