Linux.com

I agree with Bruce completely, other than being bothered by some projects having too many alphas -- if it takes 6 months to work out the bugs, and the projects feels like having like bi-weekly alphas, they'll just have a lot of alphas.. it's not a real problem. Otherwise, he's right -- open source projects can do what they want, but it really is confusing to have some projects just expect you to know if a release is stable or not; KDE 4.0 exemplifies this. They had all these 3.99 releases, based on that logic 4.0 SHOULD have been in a reasonably usable state, but wasn't so much. The other prime example for me is the Linux kernel; Linus' new attitude of "let's just put new stuff in the 2.6 series and see what happens, distro makers can sort it out." It's working OK due to git trees doing the heavy testing, but it's still a far cry from previously where, for instance, you could know 2.3.x and later 2.5.x series were possibly buggy, but 2.4.x would get more bugs fixed with each release rather than 2.6.x where some bugs fixed and others introduced by having new code tossed in.

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