I surrender

[Remco Lubbers]

Guys!

I have been following this thread and I feel I have something to add
(constructively ;-)...

On Sat, 30 Apr 2005 19:04:43 +0200, Auke Kok said:
> w9ya at arrl.net wrote:

>  >I think Richard's email reflects two things:
>  >
>  >His mentioning bugs of this nature means the devels/package maintainers
>  >are not taking due care and/or due-diligence in crafting their wares and
>  >leaving these kinds of hunt and find chores to the user.

>  I'm actually surprised about the positivity of your "rant" and when read 
>  correctly, IMO you basically express the idea that lunar definately has 
>  problems with more complex tasks. That's true, and there are reasons for 
>  that as well.
>  
>  Lunar was never meant as "the easiest distro" or "the best desktop" 
>  or... etc. One of the main goals is and always has been to provide a 
>  "stable" set of packages as much as possible. This is obviously a very 
>  'unclear' objective and may lead people to have expectations which will 
>  never be fullfilled by lunar. For others it will though.

IMHO this objective has not been met for a while now, I'm very sorry to
say! I use Lunar on about 10 workstations and 25 servers
professionally, so all machines are mission-critical. For the past few
months it has been increasingly difficult to keep all machines
up-to-date */and working/* and I must say the Richard's subject did
strike a chord. I think the problem we are facing is the fact that
there's no real stable-release. A seperate beta-release (of the whole
distro) would prevent mission-critical systems from going of-line
because a not-so-well-tested package stands in the way of the machine
doing what it is supposed to do after an update.

More and more flaws in moonbase make my users/clients unhappy, which
does keep me up at night (trying to fix things). Most recent problem:
cups/gs stopped working after a 'lunar update', that ended up looping
on the alias-problem. Another new one: gdm is no longer able to shut
down the system. Those combined with the nfs-not-mounting-at-boottime
and the tacky runlevel-switcher no longer make lunar useable as a
workstation-OS.

On the server-side there's mainly the php-compile problem using the
with-readline option (which is standard in the php4-BUILD). But Perl is
another problem (rather anoying).

To cut this already very long story short: I'm starting to doubt that
Lunar is still able to fullfill my needs; very regretably I must say!

>  I think the biggest thing people forget is that lunar is not for sissies 
>  (sorry for the wording, no offense) and also not for people who aren't 
>  willing to dig into it a bit. Most of the developers working on lunar 
>  would shrug at most of the errors we see and fix it manually for 
>  instance, just because it's obvious to them.
>  
>  This is mostly where the gap between lunar users and developers lies. 
>  Implementing and foreseeing all of these quirks is a time-intensive task 
>  and honestly we are short on developers, and time (even I am).

I do understand that and I also understand that it's very easy for us,
users not developing actively on Lunar, to point that finger and
complain; those other three (fingers) are still pointing back at us.

But devs must understand that not all users have the time or the
ability to develop...
I've tried to contribute in other ways than by developing actively....

>  However, feedback is a good thing. Even if the topic is "I give up" it 
>  might be valuable feedback (as did rpyne's email if read closely) that 
>  may help others in the future.
>  Lets just try to stay constructive. =^)

I'm trying to, but that's not always easy. Feeding back by reporting
bugs and errors doesn't always have the expected effect, so to speak.

Remco