[Fwd: Re: A migration of the YDL lists to forums]

[sloopy]

On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 19:20, Gavin Hemphill wrote:
> No Carl I won't go quietly - as one of the original supporters of 
> Terrasoft (I still have the original Championserver CD's) the recent 
> change in focus and the inability of the Terrasoft staff to manage 
> simple linux utilities or respond to support@ydl.net mail has just 
> convinced me that they really don't care anymore.  It really is time for 
> most of the people who were looking for a "leading but not bleeding 
> edge" linux distribution on the PowerPC to look elsewhere for their 
> solutions. 

As i am not a TSS employee i cant really comment on this..

> The fact that YDL 4 is going to be based on Fedora is enough 
> right there if you have been following the Fedora Core saga - Core 2 is 
> not yet ready for prime time.

based is not necessarily the 'same as' i have ran both on my machines
here and YDL4 is still in beta and significantly more polished then FC2,
with YDL i could run the installer, whereas with FC i had to do some of
my own config afterwards... the installer is where TSS spends most of
its time in 'customizing' linux for the macs and if you look at where
they start and their finished product, you will notice how significant
their contribution is to the mac community that runs linux as an OS...


>   I run linux Fedora, Mandrake, SuSe, 
> Turbolinux, and YDL on Dual X86 based machines, Dual IA64 based 
> machines, and one to 4 processor PowerPC machines (the total number of 
> machines approaches 40 in my direct control alone).  At the moment I'm 
> doing detailed evaluations of all of the major linux distributions for 
> the place I work with an eye to buying support licences for some 200 
> machines that will allow us to keep up with the leading edge and 
> security patches with the least amount of effort (sort of like the old 
> RedHat subscriptions).  Terrasoft, by focusing on the G5's and 
> apparently ignoring the G4's appear to have chosen to follow RedHat down 
> the bleeding edge road.  I guess it's to satisfy all those people who 
> complain that YDL doesn't have the "latest" whatever.

TSS is not dropping support for the 'yesterdays' machines... they are
trying their hardest to keep up with the changes of today whil still
keeping compatible with tomorrow, they are dropping support for 'Old
World' macs, but Support for 'New World' Macs will still be there (New
World macs are all the colored plastic machines... from the iMac/B&WG3
newer... i am not too familiar with the PowerBook/iBook line so i dont
know when they went to 'New World' but i do know the original clamshell
(a.k.a. 'toilet seat' ) models are New World... 

and as an aside although TSS isnt going to support Old World machines, i
am on my own going to be makeing a FAQ on running YDL4 on Old World
machines (i already have it running on a 9600/350)

>  For those of us 
> who are trying to use linux distributions for real work (not as servers) 
> the "latest" software is not always the "greatest" software.  If the 
> behavior of your compiler changes every three or four weeks you have a 
> real problem trying to develop applications.  You still need the ability 
> to keep as close to the bleeding edge as you dare in order to keep the 
> maximum number of bugs fixed.
> Nuff said, I'll now climb down off my soapbox :-)
> 	G++
> 

standing on a soapbox and giving your opinion is good... it gives TSS a
significant amount of input about their users and supporters... no
company stays in business when it ignores its customers, TSS included
and i am happy that kai has changed the plans for the discontinuation of
the ML, it is because people stood on soap boxes and shouted that it
wont be leaving...


sloopy.

p.s. the comments in the email are mine and were in no way
representative of TSS or any individual employee... i was asked if i
could post a reply about some of the comments made about YDL4 in this
post and others, but wasnt given any specific instructions on what to
say or how.