[techtalk] Re: Technical issues (was Re: [grrltalk] "Confrontational" postings)

[Jeff Dike]

> I'd say free of all known bugs - who would willingly, knowingly, release
> buggy software as anything other than an alpha or a beta release?

That would be stupid, not to mention impossible.

If you're going to try to do right by your users, you want to release 
something as soon as the benefits to them outweigh the losses.  If you don't, 
then your users have lost the net benefits over the period between when the 
benefits would have outweighed the losses had you released it and when you 
actually did release it.

That's the theory.  In practice, you try to guess when that time has arrived 
by knocking off all of the bugs you think will hit enough people hard enough 
to make the new stuff not worth it.

In the case of the Linux kernel, the benefits of 2.4 (increased scalability, 
added hardware support, the new VM system, etc) will outweigh the ocassional 
crash that the ocassional user will see.  If you wanted complete 
non-bugginess, instead of having 2.2 released almost two years ago, you'd 
still be waiting for it, because Alan is still making 2.2 releases with 
bugfixes in them.

				Jeff