Re: [HACKERS] Daemon News article

> On Sat, 29 May 1999, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
> 
> > The quote from Jolly Chen does not seem consistent with Eric Raymond's
> > analysis in "The Cathedral and the Bazzar."  Since the latter is pretty
> > well known, I would expect it to provoke disagreement unless it can be
> > justified or explained a bit more.
> 
> Assuming that one finds the analysis in TCAB to be correct, which a lot
> of people don't.  There's no need to launch into an anti-ESR war because
> of these, but there's certainly no reason not to voice honest opinions
> just because Eric disagrees with them.

Let me address this again.

People have asked why we don't follow the Linux model, where development
is continuous(no beta) and stable releases are odd (or even?).  The
reason is that this type of development model has a tendency to follow a
"it works, it's broken, it works, it's broken again" style, that spends
lots of time trying to clean up improper fixes that were applied in
previous releases.  This reminds me of gcc development, where the
compilers were riddled with bugs and certain releases where ok, but
later ones were not, and there was no way to tell them apart.  You got
to wondering whether they were going forward or backward in their
development.

Now, I know we have done that sometimes, but that certainly would happen
much more without a development/beta/final release cycle, where
experienced developers review all patches that get applied.  The
development finally becomes stable, but there is a tremendous amount of
wasted energy getting there.

Now, I will also say that I have seen software companies that do this
too, and they burden their customers with "beta of the week" while it is
labeled as an official release.  They cram features into that software
much faster that way, but is it worth the grief the customer endures?

Now, if people want to disagree with me on this, let's discuss it.

Also, I need advise on whether I should bring up such a hot issue in the
paper, or just leave the statement by Jolly as a "given" for our group.

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