talk about screwing the pooch!

[Orville Bennett]

Colin Guthrie wrote:
> '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.
Aye.


>
> 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
>