In article <1992Aug9.104834.8870@klaava.Helsinki.FI> wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) writes:
quoted text
>LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk (A. V. Le Blanc) writes:
>>What I mean is this: a solid, stable version can be used
>>by the ordinary users, while the rapidly moving kernel will be drawing
>>us hackers and innovators.  
>>In fact, this is much the way things are at the moment.  
>
>I have got the opposite impression, but I could well be wrong, since I
>haven't studied the various releases.  However, unless I have
>misunderstood, the various releases don't address the issue of
>administration, which can be a hindrance for the acceptance of Linux (or
>Unix in general).  I guess I should take a look at all the releases
>before claiming that status quo is not good enough.

Lars, I'm a user of MCC, but I used to be a hacker, and still hack
when I have time. Earlier this summer I went to Puerto Rico for a 10
day vacation, and when I came back there were 4 kernel patches, a new
GCC release and a new rootdisk. Needless to say, I was a bit
intimidated by the amount of work I would need to upgrade.

MCC 0.96 came out that day. I grabbed it, and the next day I had a
fully functional up to date linux hacker's system, on two machines,
one which I had just partitioned, and another where I resized the root
and swap partitions. No hassles.

Of course, MCC interim was not 100% up to date even then, I got the
new termcap and mount, umount, swapon from the 0.96 rootdisk. But it
was a 100% functional system (and still is, I only need to get the
new kernel and new ps sources once a week :-).

I've not changed anything on that MCC interim release since it came
out except for the kernel sources and ps, termcap and
mount/umount/swapon, which I wanted to fool with the msdos filesystem.
I think that's pretty stable, don't you?

If we want to help newbie users, I think the best we can do is push
any of the packaged releases on them, and then show them how to
recompile the kernel in case bad kernel bugs get fixed after the
packages are made. That should keep new users safe and happy.

PS. I think it might be good to have a separate boot and root disk for
the MCC, for when significant kernel changes would make it neccesarry
to release a new kernel. That way even MCC interim can always have an
-- 
Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga                            zuazaga@ucunix.san.uc.edu
Dept. of Physiology & Biophysics                   University of Cincinnati