Was feisty really ready to release ?

[Derek Broughton]

Ouattara Oumar Aziz wrote:

> Just wondering. After see so much emails on the list about feisty's
> problem, I wonder if it was really ready.

"So much"?  Actually it's very few.
> 
> On the other hand, even if feisty was postpone, it would have been the
> same result. People don't participate much in the test/bug report.

Again, I'd disagree.  People participate _very_ much in testing and bug
reporting (I confess, this is the first Ubuntu release I haven't tested).

A delay would have had the same result, though.  _All_ the bugs are never
out of a release.  If these were fixed others would have been found. 
Delaying until you're sure it's clean is what has made Debian's release
schedule laughable.  Sarge got postponed for _years_.

> So we 
> end up with a system with few hardware support.

No, we've ended up with a system that supports _tons_ of hardware.  Quite
possibly more hardware than Windows XP, as we tend not to drop support even
for stuff that's almost never used anymore.  There'll be some cutting edge
hardware that's not supported, but due to the need to reverse engineer
drivers for non-free hardware, we'll never get hardware support as
up-to-date as Windows.
> 
> What should be the best attitude ? Release it and then fix people bugs,
> find workaround for them ? Or find a way to make more and more people
> test the distribution before releasing it ?

All of the above?  I think people like and want the short release cycle
(along with the every-few-years LTS releases) and the system is generally
working.  However, it can never hurt to get more people testing.
> 
> Another problem is most of common users are afraid about reporting some
> bugs (just the idea of doing it seems complicated ) . Is there something
> to do about it ? (Apport is a great tool for that but maybe redirecting
> the user to launchpad is a bit much. )

There I'd have to agree with you.  Debian had reportbug and bug-buddy.  I
gave up waiting for Ubuntu to fix them (3 years, I think).  Nobody was
prepared to just make them work "well enough", they kept telling us that
they would have them working _perfectly_ in just a few weeks.  KDE has
a "Report Bug" option on every Help menu, that goes to bugs.kde.org.  It's
a whole lot easier to report bugs to KDE than to launchpad.

> Anyway, for all subscribers of this ML, don't hesitate about reporting
> bugs. Anytime you need a workaround for a situation, report a bug with
> it so that Ubuntu can better fits your needs.
-- 
derek