-=> Richard Falken wrote to Gamgee <=-

 G> What "communication problems" are you referring to?
 G> A followup: How has that hurt the distribution?

 RF> See those times when there is a "holyday" going on and no patches
 RF> are submitted for packages known to need the patches? It is not
 RF> frequent but package updates have gotten quiet for certain
 RF> timespans in the past. I know of people who switched certain
 RF> systems not because of this, but because the lack of explanation
 RF> casted doubt on the usefulness of the distribution as a tool.

Hmmmm, I dunno.  I follow the Changelog daily and see updates to 
-current pretty much every day.  I don't *run* current, but it is 
being actively updated.  And the stable release(s) get security 
patches/updates when needed.

 RF> The lack of an official roadmap for the release cycle is a bit
 RF> troublesome for administrators who are not targetting -current. I
 RF> have already heard of administrators who needed feature X that
 RF> was in -current but not in-stable for date Y... they didn't know
 RF> when the new Slackware release would be served, they didn't want
 RF> to shoehorn the feature locally, and they didn't want to move to
 RF> -current... Uncertainity is bad for people who work on a schedule
 RF> and in the end of the day people switches to distributions that
 RF> have predictable roadmaps.

Yeah, I can see that, at least for enterprise/commercial usage.  
For folks like me, a hobbyist at home, that's (usually) not an 
issue.  Not for me, anyway.

 RF> Also, for some reason, lots of people keep asking if Slackweare
 RF> is a dead project, which in itself suggests its presentation as a
 RF> distribution is giving people weird ideas. That is bad for
 RF> adoption and hence the ability of the distribution to raise funds
 RF> and gather collaborators. As you may know, there is a lot of dark
 RF> gossip regarding the finantial status of the whole thing. This
 RF> gossip never seems to die.

I remember talk about Pat's status a few years back (health and 
financial), but as I recall that got sorted out and I haven't 
heard much about it recently.  I could have missed it, admittedly.  

Honestly I'm pretty sure Patrick (and many/most other Slackware 
users) don't care too much about adoption rate and gaining 
collaborators.  That's part of the attraction of Slackware, in a 
strange sort of way.  <SHRUG>

I guess folks can do/use whatever they like.  I'm sticking with 
Slackware myself.



... Gone crazy, be back later, please leave message.
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