10.04? No thanks, I give up!

[Tom H]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 1:57 AM, Knapp <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 10:21 PM, zongo saiba <zongosaiba at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> What I would like to understand really is why regressive bugs? I had
>> sound in 9.10 on my external speakers and I could use my internal
>> microphone out the box. In 10.04, I had to modify alsa-base.conf in
>> order to use my external speakers in such a way that now I am unable to
>> use my internal microphone. The point being not the issue of not using
>> my internal microphone but more why a regressive bug ? How can that
>> happen and most importantly why?
>
> http://catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/
> Read the Cathedral and the Bazaar to get a deeper understanding.
> Basically Ubuntu has broken one of the golden rules of open source.
> You develop and release based on goals not times.
>
> To look at it from a different way. They are changing the whole boot
> loader so that they can get under 10 seconds boots. This will break a
> lot of stuff and of course all the other bits are changing as they are
> improved or updated. All this breaks stuff. Open source is ALWAYS
> changing, even when it does not need to. This leads to better stuff in
> the long run but breaks stuff in the short run. You have to pick, new
> and broken or old and stable. Ubuntu runs more to the new side.
>
> Also a driver might be made 20% faster but that change breaks 3% of
> the users' computers. That is not seen until it is released because
> the programmers did not have that computer system in shop. They then
> get a bug report and fix it. YOU must file that report or it will
> never get fixed. That is how open source works.

I don't think that having a release every six months or so is a
problem, as long as the people who are installing it or upgrading to
it do not expect it to work without a hitch. Both Ubuntu and Fedora
releases follow a twice-yearly release schedule (more or less for
Fedora) and have teething problems when they are first published (in
the same way that OSX had when it was on a yearly schedule).

I take issue though with the Ubuntu model for LTS. It makes people
think that a release is OK as soon as it is published when in fact it
is only slightly less buggy, if at all, than Ubuntu's non-LTS
releases. I am at the moment in a permanent fight with my clients to
convince them to wait for 10.04.1 before I upgrade their servers. I
upgraded the boxes of a new client immediately after the release
because I would have lost/not gained him had I kept on saying "wait"
but it was a silly risk. Thankfully, they are running OK, probably
because the unstable stuff is generally pulled in by the desktop
tasksels or other desktop-related apps.