Slashdot is discussing "FC3: worthwhile or not ?"

[Allen Kistler]

Michael A. Peters wrote:
> On 11/15/2004 08:45:54 AM, Kim Lux wrote:
> 
>> Ouch: "Basically, what I'm saying is I fail to see where FC stands  out
>> above other distributions that would make me want to use it. Granted,
>> after the general buginess I experienced with FC2, I may be biased,
>> but
>> the whole point is the fact that I wasn't having similar issues with
>> the
>> other distributions, so why should I have to put up with them with
>> FC?"
> 
> 
> People who post stuff like that rarely can identify what their issue 
> was. Last *serious* redhat/fedora problem I can recall was the gcc 2.96 
> thing. Oh - and RH8 shipped with a gnome that would go crazy if you 
> made your panel go vertical or added a vertical drawer.
> 
> 9 time out 10 when I have come across a seriously messed up system, I 
> find that the user has replaced half of the vendor supplied stuff with 
> 3rd party (less or no QA) replacements, forced installed stuff opposed 
> to resolving dependencies, etc.
> 
> And of course - there are always the slashdot trolls - who post just to 
> get reactions.

See bug 123281 about flakey behavior with genuine SCSI drives with mixed
audio/data CDs.

In addition to the problem listed there, I've had highly variable
success with writing CDRs from kernel to kernel.  I've got FC3 installed
on 2 different machines with completely different hardware (that *ouch*
works fine with that other OS and Roxio) -- Plextor CD & Plextor CDR,
Toshiba DVD & Teac CDR.

I suspect what happened is that IDE has overtaken SCSI so much that not
as much genuine SCSI testing occurs among kernel hackers.  I know modern
IDE is supposed to be SCSI in disguise (i.e., same command set), but
apparently there are some real world differences.  kernel 2.6 introduced
"simplification" of the SCSI/IDE code, but perhaps a little too much got
simplified away.

The current Nahant beta appears to be based on the work that went into
FC3.  I'm not a RHEL tester, but I'm hoping RHEL testing exposes a wider
range of SCSI devices to the new kernel and shows up errors better than
FC2/3 (and kernel 2.5) testing did.