Mandrake Linux Development Process Changes

joestar writes "Just found at MandrakeLinux.com: 'MandrakeSoft today announced a major evolution in the way that future Mandrake Linux distributions will be engineered and released. The purpose of this new development process is to provide the highest level of new features, as well as maximizing the quality of new products.' In short: for each release, there will be a 'Community' release, equivalent to a common Mandrake release, with all latest features. Several months later an 'Official' release - based on the 'Community' - will be available. Both of them will be released publicly and supported. The new process will start with the upcoming Mandrake 10.0."

Comments

Interesting...

[dubdays]

This is actually similar to what Mandrake (and others) already do. Isn't this kind of like just releasing another release candidate in the alpha-beta-rc-final flow? Still, I like the idea, because there have been numerous times I've purchased the boxed version, and it has had major problems that immediately needed to be patched. This is just a way to better refine the distro before selling it on the shelves.

Great move!

[joestar]

Once again, Mandrake listened to its community of users and developpers, and I think that this is a great move for Mandrake to offer an excellent level of feature and innovation in its new releases, as well as an excellent level of polishment in a second time... And another good news is that both versions will be officially supported!

I think it's a very smart understanding of a community project, and I think Mandrake can be thanked for its continued sense of innovation since 1998...

After the recent and excellent financial from MandrakeSoft, this is all good news!

Re:Great move!

[miyako]

One of us misunderstood what is going on here, and it could be me, but from what I understand it goes something like this:
Mandrake: Hey community, here is the community version, try it it out, it's pretty stable, we've beta tested it and everything.
Community: Hey, there are bugs X,Y and Z here
Mandrake: Oh, our bad, well we fixed all those bugs and updated the security patches, you subscribers can go ahead and download the new version while we are getting the cds stamped and the manuals printed.
*Boxed set arrives in stores*
Mandrake: Ok, the boxed set is out now, it would be really neat if you could go buy it, but we'll let you download it too.

Re:Wait a minute?

[RazzleFrog]

Apparently you can link to an article but not read it. They are filing under the French equivalent of Chapter 11 - Reorg. During the process the company MUST continue to do business because they still have to pay debtors. Otherwise they would have filed the equivalent of Chapter 7 - liquidation.

It's not the same at all

[joestar]

1) Both Mandrake Linux Community and Mandrake Linux Official versions will be publicly released and supported.

2) Fedora is in fact the same as the Mandrake Cooker project, which started... 5 years ago.

So I'm afraid that *Mandrake* is innovating with this new scheme. Red Hat is just leaving its users alone...

Re:It's not the same at all

[Afrosheen]

Community release != beta release. It's a finished OS, and Mandrake 10 is currently in beta. The way Mandrake normally does it goes something like this:

1. Release beta 1 through 4
2. Release release candidates 1 through 4
3. Final release.

The process is usually around 6 months or so. There is a cooker freeze that takes place at some point during the process where all new packages get locked into a specific version number. This cuts down on problems later in the beta testing phases.

By summer Mandrake 10 should be available since beta 1 has already hit the net. When the distro is ready, mdk10 will allow ISO downloads to club members FIRST, while everything is available via ftp mirrors. Next comes the shipping boxed sets, finally a box set on store shelves and freely downloadable ISOs. The boxed set/iso downloading scheme is new and while some people have complained, it's really in Mandrake's best interests to do it this way.

Big picture:

[capn_buzzcut]

Mandrake is responding to its user's wishes. If you don't like the way Mandrake does things, the good news is that there are several other distros to choose from. There's no need to rag on Mandrake for making this change - it's certainly more innovative and user friendly than what Redhat and Suse have done with their sales model. Remember, you can still download free Mandrake iso's and updates are still free too.

Re:If you can't beat them, join them?

[jmania]

Mandrakesoft have created the cooker system since 1999 which is well organized with multiple tools (changelog, cvs, wiki, etc).

The difference between the Debian release cycle and the Mandrake release cycle is that Mandrake is much faster to include new features/easy to install. This idea behind this new process is to add an additional cycle with a stable branch. So increase the stability while keeping the cutting edge.

Gentoo

[destiney]

If you guys would just shutup and install Gentoo you wouldn't be having these stupid distro discussions.

Gentoo is simple, one install per machine for life.

Put this in your daily cron to keep the whole system up to date:
emerge sync
emerge -pvu world
Then every morning you can see what new stuff you may want to update that day.

Look for new software with:
emerge -s whatever

Remove software with:
emerge -pvC whatever

Unless you have and run exactly what chipset and compiler flags your "distro" based binarys are compiled for, your system will never be as fast as it can be.

And thanks RedHat for making me a Gentoo user!

Re:Gentoo

[buchanmilne]

Gentoo is simple, one install per machine for life.

On Mandrake also, except it doesn't take a week to get a functional system.


Put this in your daily cron to keep the whole system up to date:
emerge sync


urpmi.update


emerge -pvu world


urpmi --auto-select --auto


Then every morning you can see what new stuff you may want to update that day.


On Mandrake it's already updated for you, you don't have to wait the rest of the day for it to compile ...


Look for new software with:
emerge -s whatever


urpmq -y whatever
(not quite the same, but there are other tools)


Remove software with:
emerge -pvC whatever


urpme whatever

Unless you have and run exactly what chipset and compiler flags your "distro" based binarys are compiled for, your system will never be as fast as it can be.

Mandrake already ships with the optimisations that make the biggest difference ... some optimisations for your "chipset" (I assume you mean CPU, there aren't many compile-time optimisations you can make for the motherboard chipset besides in the kernel ...) cause instability (OpenOffice.org for instance doens't do -O3), and most software doesn't have support for MMX etc (only multimedia stuff), and in those cases there are conditionals in the packages, so it's a simple 'rpm --rebuild --with mmx mplayer*.src.rpm'.

Re:Pay for Linux...

[marsu_k]

If you read the article at all, the "Official" release of Mandrake will still be available as a free download. However, you can buy a boxed set or "join the club" to support Mandrake.

I'm personally running 9.2 on this computer right now, and despite of hearing many complaints about bugs I can't say they've bothered me too much. Yes, I've had to install a few patches and bugfixes (and the kernel source wasn't included in the downloadable ISO's, which is kinda strange), but as I have a DSL connection this hasn't been an issue. Urpmi is great, the PLF rpm's too.

I haven't paid anything yet - but am concidering buying 10.0 Official boxed. Just to support them.

Are you another clueless Debian user ...

[buchanmilne]

... comparing apt to rpm?

package management is much easier with debian than with an RPM system.

So I'm guessing you use dpkg to install all packages on your Debian box? What, you don't???

Just as I don't use rpm to install all RPM packages on my box, I use urpmi for 99.9% of them, I only use rpm when I want to revert a package to test scripts in an upgrade scenario for the packages I maintain.

Re:Are you another clueless Debian user ...

[buchanmilne]

The thing that makes dpkg/deb 'easier' than rpms is that rpms have this horrible addiction to breaking and having horrible dependencies. Then it gets to be difficult/a pain in the ass.

And what precisely is different about deb's that prevent this? How does a deb package on it's own avoid problems RPMs have??

It doesn't.

There are a few things you can't do with RPMS that you can do with deb's (like suggested packages), and there are a few things you can't do with DEBs that you can with RPMS (AFAIK you can't do triggers with DEBs).

The differences you see between "DEBs" and "RPMs" may largely be due to the fact that you are comparing Redhat RPMs to DEBs. Redhat doesn't do library packages (like Mandrake and Debian do), so upgrading a library package can break all other software that uses that library (whereas on Mandrake you can have say libsasl.so.7 - in libsasl7 - and libsasl2.so.2 - in libsasl2 - installed simultaneously).

So, please don't make generic comparisons.

There is no fundamental difference between DEBs and RPMs regarding library packaging, just differences in the way different distros do it.

There will however always still be some library problems (like the notorious libpng2 vs libpng3 problem), but neither Debain nor Mandrake are better than the other in that respect ... since it's a problem that could even affect source-based distros ....