On Sat, 3 Aug 2002, Paul Reeves wrote:

> William L. Thomson Jr. wrote:
> > On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 17:26, Scott Taylor wrote:

> principle does not apply to point releases. RH 7.2 shipped with a 2.4.7
> kernel (iirc) and that is (was?) a stable kernel (at that time).

From my experience, RH follows the same rule with it's distribution. 7.1
was beta, as far as I'm concerned, I had nothing but troubles with it,
same with Mandrake 8.1. Both were, basically, a trial of the new 2.4
kernel set, which also went through some huge growing pains. However,
it's not _just_ the kernel that makes a distribution. Both RedHat 7.2 and
MDK8.2 are much more stable then their predecessors.

> It is news to me that a commercial organisation like RedHat would go to
> the trouble of making a release widely available that was not considered
> stable just because it was odd-numbered. I mean, they are boxing it up
> and shipping it out to retailers, aren't they? Perhaps someone could
> provide a link or a quote from an official RedHat source that indicates
> the real facts of the matter.

You only have to use it to know the difference, it profoundly obvious
regardless if the distributor admits it or not.

> If this is just 'folk wisdom' it certainly doesn't apply across the
> board. I've been using the SuSE 7.3 distro for nearly a year now and it
> is rock solid in almost every respect.

SuSE is definitely a very different world; which is not a bad thing.

Scott.