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Re:Hmmm...strange version to pick...

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on March 16, 2006 01:45 AM
The title is misleading and the review writer knows this. And its questionably ethical for the reviewer to not state clearly upfront as to which test release this "review" is based on. I question his motives for being less than forthcoming with regard to exactly which isoset he tested. Shame on him and shame on his editor.

Anyone relying on this review to provide an accurate representation as to which applications are available in fedora CORE 5 or what the default configuration will be.. are being misled. It's impossible to even to peer-review this review for factual errors without knowing which test release he's using. Case in point XFCE 4 is NOT going to be in FC5 and will be in fact a part of Fedora Extras.

Looking back over the daily build reports of the development tree... XFCE was removed from Core in feb 2005.. BEFORE FC4. So how does this reviewer make the claim that XFCE is available IN fC5 similar to KDE and GNOME? Again I have to question the motives of the writer or his competence. Best case, it could simply be that the reviewer has completely missed the fact that Fedora CORE and Fedora EXTRAS are seperate entities. So I'll clear that up:

GNOME and KDE are available IN Fedora CORE 5.. which means available at install time on the iso-media.

XFCE is in Fedora EXTRAS.. which means currently only available via online repositories post-install.

If this article is based on tsst2.. its relevancy to what the final fc5 will look like is questionable at best. At worst its delibrately misleading and designed to give readers the incorrect expectations. This article says...bluntly.. that fc5 will have XFCE... a factual error.

He also incorrectly makes the assessment that the final fc5 release will have a desktop significantly slowed down by selinux. There has been several discussions in the test-list about performance issues in the test releases due to verbose kernel debugging being enabled. Again I question the motives behind this reviewer's choice to not be upfront about using a test release as a basis for the review. You can not take the performance characteristics from a test release and present them as if they are similiar to the final release.

At the very least this reviewer should have filed a bugzilla ticket and referenced the ticket in this review... so that the developers could tell him and every reader of this review exactly why there is a performance penalty associated with the kernels with selinux enabled in the test releases.

This review does a disservice to its readership and to the fedora project. And I question the motivations behind a review of a test release from a reviewer who has not been participating in the testing process, not communicating in the established community mailinglist fedora-test-list , nor filing bug reports. The testing process for fedora is open and I expect anyone who chooses to stand on their soapbox commenting on the testing process while its going -on.. to be actively involved in that process.

It is a HUGE waste of effort for a reviewer to install a test release and have absolutely no intention of providing feedback through the established communication channels so developers can be made aware of the problems the review had.
As community members of a larger open source community we should DEMAND better of every single technology reviewer who steps up and makes a complaint. The fedora development model is open, if you care enough about fedora to write a review about it.. then you should of course care enough to point out your concerns in the established mechanisms to let the developers know what problems you ran into. Problems do not get fixed because reviewers write reviews in the open source world... and I'm pretty sure this reviewer knows that as an established linux user.

Its dishonest... complaining in a review about performance problems associated with selinux in test release without filing a bugreport or attempting to ask the active testing community what's going.. is shameful. Does this reviewer care if this gets fixed or not? If he doesn't care enough about it to file a bugreport as part of the testing process leading to fc5... why does he care enough to write about it here? Again I question his motives. How long ago did he do his test install.. a month before the review was published? A month where he didn't inform the developers who could have reviewed a bugreport from him and fixed a problem if it existed. Seems to me this only makes sense if he interested in making sure fc5 has a large performance problem.

I encourage everyone reading this to ignore this review.

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