A couple of rants about Launchpad

[David Gerard]

2009/3/10 Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com>:

> Honestly, the only meaning that I can consistently assign to "not
> supported" is "we'll reject bugs you file about it"; and that isn't the
> case for 'apt-get dist-upgrade' in general.
> It is true that such upgrades are less well-tested - that's simply a
> statement of fact. Nevertheless, they'll generally work and only require
> relatively minor manual intervention (especially in the hands of
> knowledgeable users), and we ought not to mislead people into thinking
> that the tools they like flat-out won't work and that they enter some
> unsupported twilight zone when they use them, when that isn't true.
> "Supported" is a more nebulous adjective than I would like!


Then, to get back to the original phrasing of the questions (rather
than the word "supported"):

Can it be expected to work more often than not?
*Should* it be expected to work more often than not?
Who is specifically, actively interested in having it work more often
than not, in real-world conditions rather than just on a Platonic
ideal machine using nothing but the CD software?

I appreciate these may seem pointy questions, but they are the actual issue ...


- d.