Some questions to warly (or anyone interested)
I'll introduce the question with my own thoughts on the subject, perhaps leading to a clarification of assumptions / issues hidden behind (under ?) the question.
I do not want to introduce troll, rather state matter of factly some questions that arise from time to time and that may require a clear answer.
Can you precise differences between official and community in the 2006 edition ?
From my understanding :
- official is now the maintained distribution that will lead to newest products from Mandriva
- updates are availables but with no version upgrades for packages, only security fixes (no new features)
- example : Firefox 1.5 is not available and will not (sure ? ;-) )
- community began with 2006.0 then with 2006.1 which are "not supported" versions
- no security fix ?
- less resources to fix bugs ? I understand that developers / testers cannot test each and every version that gets out due to the
- maybe "self supported" would be a better choice of term ? or it could be Cooker-like version to have a taste for risk
- brings new versions for KDE or Gnome for example, backported from Cooker
=> what should users choose ? official for stable installation ? community restricted to testing latest version of packages or usable ?
- personnally, I do not understand the choice of bleeding-edge for bleeding-edge's sake... but I tend to apply the principle "do not change something that works" in computer science (unless I really miss a killer-feature, but then I'm ready to assume the risks or I'd like to have something supported, maybe easily reversible if the newest feature is not worth the instability I finally obtain).
- I think this is important that users understand that latest / newest / hypest is not always better, simply works may be suficiently good (and less disappointing... who thought of kat ? that will keep improving I'm sure ;-) )
Let's take a matter of fact example : 2006.1
ok, I get latest Gnome 2.12 and a beautiful paperwall (though it makes me think that I may have loggued as root with the choice of the color red...)
- what does this latest version of Gnome bring that is useful to the user ? why would s/he choose this version rather than the supported one ?
- can I expect some support ? can I expect that may-be-broken applications be provided ?
- can I revert easily to a supported version ?
I think, it would be important to state what the user gets from this version and what s/he does not get, in order not to be disappointed. Then the user can make her/his choice in conscience.
Behind all this is the question of stability, usability : is it better to have latest broken version or not up-to-date version that simply works ? (well, indeed, in some cases you may obtain a latest version that simply works... but that's not the point). Is the user ready to obtain instability as the price of newness, I think not.
Intel partnership
Though on the edge of troll, the approach is to understand the difficulties of Mandriva's commitment to Free Software with the proprietary approach taken by products vendors. (Mostly from the point of view of a Free Software developer).
- unless the NDA prevent Mandriva to talk about it, what does this partner ship brings to the community of Free Software ? To put it more clearly, let's state this :
- as was the case with nvidia / ati before their proprietary drivers were included in Power Pack *only*, now comes intel proprietary drivers for wifi (mostly) to put it simply. Well, the driver is free in fact, but the firmware cannot be included directly in a free distribution and is certainly not free due to its license...
- could Mandriva address Intel's intriguing lack of respect for Free Software when providing the firmware under their license which nearly prevents it from being easily distributed with Free Software ?
- some people told that the choice of xorg-6.9.0 in cvs version (for development purpose, not stable) was needed to obtain Intel's certification : is it true ? Then Mandriva (and its users) had to work and wait for a stabilized xorg (with both ati and nvidia free drivers). All ends well before the beginning of year 2006, but does Mandriva think it was worth the stress ?