[Fwd: Re: [Wylug-help] Which Version of Linux?]

[Philip Wyett]

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 21:38 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Monday 24 Oct 2005 20:23, Philip Wyett wrote:
> >
> > I am not doing down Mandrake/Mandriva totally as it has it's merits,
> > but when it comes to issues they seem to be head of the queue. My all
> > time favourite is the Mandrake 9.2 install Lucky/Goldstar (LG) drive
> > killer and the blaming of LG for not testing their drives against
> > Mandrake, but no taking responsibility for a lack of Quality Control.
> >
> I have no problem with your choosing another distro, but you certainly 
> have your facts wrong.  The LG problem had nothing to do with not 
> testing against Mandrake - and incidentally, Mandrake were the first 
> distro to be caught by this, but not the only one.  The incident was 
> down to LG manufacturing some drives which used a standard call in a 
> way that is totally non-standard.  If I recall correctly, a call to 
> flush the buffer caused it to erase the eprom.
> 

As I recall the problem was MandrakeSoft at that time merging a non
standard packet writing kernel patch that issued the FLUSH_CACHE command
(only valid on recorders) unconditionally that ended up hosing drives.
True, LG really should have issued firmware for readers that ignored the
command, but the kernel patch should have included the necessary checks
and been checked extensively being a non standard patch. I stand by my
reference to Quality Control especially with patches.

> Other issues?  Of course in the first few weeks after the Club/Community 
> release more and more bugs are found and fixed.  It's too late for the 
> pressed disks, but if you read anything at all about linux in general 
> and Mandriva in particular you would know that you should head out to 
> an update repository immediately after installaton.  How else will you 
> stay secure?
> 

I never mentioned post release day patching for this particular issue.
In one of my previous mails in this thread I stated about post release
day updates and my opinion it is better to give a new release some time
before installing to get those. The paragraph is going off
topic/personally insulting and I'm not even going to go there.

> > Another issue with Mandriva is the mass of variants, club this and
> > update that. Not great in aiding any newcomer who is looking for
> > clarity.
> >
> Again, you are completely misled.  Club members get early access to some 
> newly released packages, acting, in a way, as late beta testers.  There 
> is no way that club versions are separate.  Other distros have similar 
> arrangements.  Debian have had an unstable release for quite some 
> considerable time before the recent full upgrade - apologies to Debian 
> users if I have over-simplified this.  There's nothing surprising and 
> nothing sinister about this arrangement.
> 

To be misled would indicate being led astray by another and that ain't
the kind of person I am. I am merely referring to a large array of
separate products i.e. Corporate Server, Mandriva 2006, Discovery LX,
Powerpack and Powerpack+. Then we get into the club and more membership
levels than you can throw a stick at. This is what I was describing as a
mass of variants and it's ability to be confusing to the newcomer.

Sorry, Debian is nothing like Mandriva in this regard and above I think
illustrates that. Other distributions have a similar spread of offerings
but not really to the extent of Mandriva.

If you choose to reply, could you do it to the list please.

Regards

Phil

-- 

Personal email: philip.wyett at w-tech.co.uk

Work email: pwyett at a-novo.co.uk

Blog: http://www.philipwyett.blogspot.com

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