Crappy Products Cost More!!

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2002-06-27 at 13:58, Tom Achtenberg wrote:
> Would you settle for a product that is 70 to 80% complete?   How about if they left off one tire on your car?  Bernard's attitude is a horrible example of bad customer service.  (If what you report is accurate.)
> 
----
Would I settle for a product that is 70 to 80% complete?

I do every day all the time.

That is the very nature of open source software.

I also use cvs on projects and yes that is exactly what I am settling
for. The only other option is a rollback to the last 'stable'. With
every distro, someone has to make the decision on what to include...and
when you have a project like KDE which progresses rapidly, the decision
to use the last stable or a more recent checkout from cvs is strictly
the person's call that is packaging it up.

In RH 7.3 distro, the KDE release was a post-3.0.0 checkout used and it
already incorporated a lot of what is 3.0.1...the figure of 70 to 80%
wasn't mine but it was my hazy recollection of another's on the
valhalla-list@redhat.com - which when I searched the archives, was
actually 90% but that isn't material at all. No doubt some things have
changed since it was packaged for 7.3.

There is a more up to date version in rawhide - pretty typical of redhat
to take the fast changing projects and put the updates in rawhide since
rawhide represents the edge of development but not to be
supported...only for testing. Obviously when the packages are installed
by users such as you and I and we report back on our experiences, then
they adjust as necessary.

I wish your attitude didn't always reflect a chip on your shoulder.
Bero's attitude has nothing to do with customer service. He's a software
engineer doing his job. If you don't like the decisions that RedHat
makes in packaging the binaries...then you can roll your own...download
the source code to KDE 3.0.1 and install it yourself. My guess is that
if you knew what you were doing, that you would want to use the cvs of
KDE 3.1 and be settling for less than 70-80% at this moment but that's
the beauty of open source...you can do that. But if you merely want to
work with 'stable' releases, you can install the rpm-development package
and you can create your own source rpm's, compile and install them just
like any other rpm binary that you get from redhat and install it.

I know that Bero felt that nothing of enough significance changed from
the KDE 3.0.0 checkout that he used in RH 7.3 and the 'stable' KDE 3.0.1
to warrant an official errata update. If you Tom Achtenberg feel he is
'an example of horrible customer service', I would suggest that you send
your appraisals to him... bero@redhat.de and spare us some of your
uniformed outbursts.

Craig