User Feedback :: newby



Years and years ago a professor said, "It's possible to be technically correct, but humanly wrong."

SaidinUnleashed posted the following which is now "locked."  The humanly wrong part is that the person new to DSL/*nix may not realize the difference between a stable release and a "release candidate."  Is 3.0.0 "stable?"  Is 3.0.1 "stable?"  Postings are appearing that suggest neither is the case.

So, to be technically correct AND humanly correct:  What is the last stable release that people should be using?

SaidinUnleashed posted: Oct. 12 2005,10:18:

If you have issues with one of the public Release Candidates, please post your issue in the "Release Candidate" forum, in the thread for the RC you are using.

The RC forum is the ONLY appropriate place to post issues with our public beta releases. The rest of the forums are for stable releases ONLY.

As stated in the Please Read thread in the RC forum, the release candidates are for those of you who are experienced with Linux and DSL in particular.

So if you are new to DSL and Linux, you should probably use the latest stable release.

Thanks.

-J.P.
"Stable" doesn't mean that there won't be any problems.  This is the case for all software, no matter who writes or maintains it.  The fact is that every program has bugs....even when you get rid of all the known bugs there are often new ones that appear while fixing them.

The term "stable" is also applied differently with different projects....some developers have a billion development stages with only one of those stages considered stable.  With DSL it's a much simpler thing....there are release candidates (dsl-<version>RC<rcversion>.iso) followed by a release (dsl-<version>.iso).  Occasionally there is a very minor fix, as with 3.0.1, but all non-RC releases are initially considered to be at the same level of stability.
A resease candidate would have RC in it (I am currently using 3.0RC2) which the community would test and then the fixes would go into the next release 3.0.1 and the developers would work on the next version for a while before releasing another candidate (lets say 3.1RC1) for the community to test.  The developers can't gaurantee that there are no bugs in the latest release (which can be found in the download section under current release) but they can gaurantee that they, and people in the community, have tested it as best they can.  When you download a release candidate you would select the release candidate forum and there would be a link to the latest RC which you would select to download and any comments should go in that thread.  General questions comments for the current release should go in the Feedback forum.  Otherwise specific questions (for the current or past releases) should go in the specific forum (i.e. multimedia, HD Install, Networking, etc...).

So if you download an RC post bugs in the RC forum (even if you notice that this has existed over past versions so that the developers don't have to go looking everywhere for bug fixes for the next release, they also incororate other problems found but putting bug reports in the RC forum would help them considerably).  

If a bug is found in a past version and is being looked into by the community it will be tested under new versions during troubleshooting in the specific forum for that type of problem.  If the problem does not exist in a new version the user will be informed and they may be able to find a workaround or get the latest version.  If the problem still exists and was missed for the current release the developers will know and see what they can do.

I think this is the basics.  If I have missed (or messed up) something then I hope someone can correct me.

EDIT:
(of course if you do like I do on dialup and get the latest RC downloaded and installed and the new version is released it would be pointless to post to the RC forum.  I would have to read the change log, posts, etc... to see if the problem had been discovered already then post in the specific forum for that issue.  Some common sense would need to be used in a situation like this, I would be the one fallen behind and it would be up to me to play catchup to determine if the problem had been fixed and/or where to post).

original here.