talk about screwing the pooch!

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Orville Bennett at 18/08/09 04:05 did gyre and gimble:
>> But before upgrading to an new
>> version one should read release notes anyway, so don't blame us for
>> your lack of information.
> For serious? Where would someone find that in synaptic/update-manager?
> 
> Or perhaps, users should quickly scribble things down as words fly by at 
> FTL speeds, and then go to the website for those hundreds of software 
> pkgs installed during a system upgrade.
> 
> I'd think that's not something the end user of a linux distro should 
> have to, or be expected to do. I mean that's like expecting people to 
> read EULAs. The reason they even put all that stuff in there about you 
> relinquishing all rights to your first born and left nut is because they 
> _know_ no one reads them. But I digress.

Well in that case the job of informing the user is the *distros* job, 
not the upstream project. Any comments of disgust about the fact that an 
update was forced on you should be directed at the distro, not the 
upstream project.

Say I write a program that wipes hard drives and due to a distro 
packaging problem it appears as a boot option and then nukes all your 
data. Is that *my* fault for writing the program and "allowing" distros 
to ship it? No it's the distro's fault as is this.

For such a large change (KDE 3 -> KDE 4) the disto has the obligation to 
let users know that some apps making such a transition will have reduced 
functionality to what you've maybe come to expect as the porting work 
continues.

The blame is quite firmly in the distro court here.

Now obviously it's all a vicious circle as half-knowledgable users will 
ask (quite strongly) that their distro includes App X @ version Y in the 
distro. Perhaps 2.0 should have stayed at 1.99.x for longer, perhaps 
this would have discouraged said users, but at the end of the day the 
distro people should be familiar enough with a project to know when it's 
a good idea to ship any new version as the default version available to 
users.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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