Re: [PLUG] Thunderbird 3 (sucks so far)

[Jack Hill <ejh56@drexel.edu>]

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010, Greg Helledy wrote:
>
> Just like with KDE4.  Somehow, the "released when it's good and ready"
> ideal is being lost.

There is certainly a balance to be struck between releasing software that
is not quite ready for production use and having old, but stable and well
tested releases. However, I believe that it is better err on the side of
pushing a release out, even with a few bugs, so the community can benefit
from the new development as soon as possible. This way if I want one of
the new features and don't mind the bugs I can upgrade. Otherwise I would
wait for the bugs to be fixed before upgrading. I agree with esr in his
essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" [1] that this is a better development
model.

It is true that most users don't want to read the release notes for every
piece of software that they have installed. This is where your
distribution comes in. Ubuntu hasn't shipped TB3 yet, and it is marked
unstable in gentoo. Yes, Ubuntu did ship KDE4 before they should have, but
this can be contrasted to openSuSE who put in the extra work to make even
the early KDE4 releases very usable. The problem that I have with the
KDE4 release was that support was that KDE3 became antiquated too
quickly, so the don't upgrade yet path was less attractive. However, with
limited developer resources I support moving on to the new release.

The next big project (that I know of) that is doing a major upgrade is
GNOME. I guess we'll get to see how they handle it.


Jack
[1] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/

P.S. I should note that I'm not familiar with how Mozilla numbers their
releases (I know everyone does it differently). If in the past the X.0
releases have been production ready then maybe they should have made this
a beta. My personal preference for numbering is, alpha's eat data and
crash a lot, beta's crash, X.0 (for X > 0) are mostly there but may have
usability or configuration bugs, X.Y (for Y > 0) are production ready.



>
> Greg
>
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