Gutsy gets let out but I go to jail!!

[floke]

My original post here

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=594210

was slung in jail for a crime it did not commit.

According to Pricechild the post was an attempt at flaming or flame-bait, and - I quote: "Your thread was bashing Ubuntu and not intended to be constructive at all. You also posted it in a support forum when your thread was not for support".

So....the point of the thread was that

(a) Gutsy was released too early

(b) that a lot of people have come to this conclusion,

(c) that there is a general sense of denial about this in the Ubuntu forums,

(d) and that this denial is bad for the future of Ubuntu (and, since Ubuntu is clearly an important distro, by extension, Linux), since it means that the same thing - a badly undercooked release - could happen again.

My post explicitly stated that I think Ubuntu is "great distro and an important one for Linux as a whole". I also stated that "Gutsy has not been a complete disaster".

I have also, on numerous occasions, defended Ubuntu against flame attacks on other forums, and will continue to do so (though Gutsy makes it harder).

The post was clearly not designed to attack Ubuntu - exactly the opposite in fact, since it clearly expresses concerns about the way Ubuntu is going. That it was posted in a help forum appears to be the only factually correct point that Pricechild has to make.

That said - I don't expect this to be taken out of the jail.

I think the mods do a fantastic job, and for 95% of the time get their decisions spot on. The other 5% can be put down to natural human error.

The problem is, though, that when the mods make an error they never seem to be big enough to accept it. Doing so, of course, would strengthen, rather than weaken, their position, but I doubt whether they see this either.

[jdong]

Gutsy is a big steaming pile of monkey poo

That's really nice to say to the thousands of people (including myself) who have spent the past 6 months of their lives working towards this new version, implementing features the community wanted, often sacrificing elements of our personal lives to work on Ubuntu. What for? Are we getting paid? No... we do it because we want to. Does seeing this kind of feedback make me want to commit myself to another release? I don't know.

....well ok its not that bad - but seriously - what the hell were they thinking when they sat around and decided that this was ready for release?

Do you know any members of the Release Team? Have you been following their decisions and rationale? It's a terribly insensitive remark to be making.


As far as your upgrade issues, you've done nothing but complain about them. Do you think we sit around and go "Hmm, yeah, this setup would break upgrades. You know what'd be really funny? Let's leave the bug in and let everyone suffer!"? No. We try to fix all the upgrade related bugs that we find, not to mention reports of upgrade problems help us identify weak spots in the upgrader and redesign that for the next release. A lot of work has gone into the upgrade manager to work around common failure points and also output more debugging logs. How about opening a bug on Launchpad for each upgrade failure and attaching output of /var/log/dist-upgrader-*?


Overall, PriceChild was absolutely correct in that your post was not constructive in the least. Just jailing the post was a treat to you -- most other staff members would have taken greater action.

[floke]

I think the developers do a fantastic job actually. My post is not critical of the work they put in; unpaid, long hours, personal sacrifice and all. I am perfectly aware of this and both admire and respect what they do.

What my post is critical of, however, is the fact that 7.10 does appear (and I am sure that most people who have used it would agree with me) to have been released too early. Who's fault this is I don't know. Maybe the devs are pushed by the biannual deadline, maybe its something else. You're right - I don't know any of them so I don't know what it is.

The title of the post was deliberately provocative. Clearly, as the first line of my post stated, I do not really think that 7.10 is a steaming pile of monkey poo! But nevertheless the release/upgrade cycle does appear to be broken. The sheer volume of problems to have emerged following the release are not caused by me; they are documented facts and suggest that my points have more substance than perhaps you are prepared to admit.

Shall I say this again? I think Ubuntu is a great distro and what happens to it clearly has a great impact on Linux as a whole. I'm sure the gross impact of 7.10 has been positive, but I do dislike the attitude that I have frequently seen that implies that the issues with 7.10 are simply something par for the course, something we just have to get used to. To say - as many have done - that you shouldn't upgrade until a raft of fixes have been released, simply tells me that, if there are a raft of things still to be fixed, it should not have been put out. If it ain't ready, it ain't ready.

There definitely think there is an insular, head-in-the-sand mentality surrounding this issue, and I do think that it needs to be addressed. To state that a thread of this kind could result in serious punitive measures merely goes to prove the point.

[jdong]

Remember that your experience with Gutsy is relative to your setup and hardware. There are many of us here that think Gutsy is working fine and is a solid release. Regressions are an unfortunate fact of release. Whether we released when we did or 45 years later, there's bound to be regressions still. Reporting them, and regularly booting/testing/reporting on LiveCD's during a development cycle are the best way that we have of combatting that.


Making provocative statements and titles in a manner to incite others to respond is pretty much flamebaiting, and nonproductive towards the bettering of Ubuntu.

[floke]

Well I have started another thread to even things out...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=595120

[jdong]

Thanks. Just to make things clear, we don't mind "Gutsy works worse than Feisty" threads if they go in a constructive direction (i.e. trying to figure out what's wrong, and how it can be fixed in the future, or even as an update to Gutsy)

What does get on our nerves are people who argue about things who go wrong with Gutsy, don't give specifics of what exactly went wrong, then expect that their dose of criticism somehow magically will make Hardy better. This cycle only leads to disappointment after disappointment, and is best broken

We're all here to help, and we all have different skillsets. I don't expect everyone to be a programmer capable of fixing the bugs they find on their systems. However, I think we can all be capable of describing coherently what's wrong so those who have these skills can go and fix the bug!