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The release of a new alpha (which will create lots more bug reports) while there are outstanding bugs seems like it would create quite a logjam at Novell.

The alphas are milestone snapshots in a continuously evolving development process. They do not encourage people to use it UNLESS they are prepared to find the breakages and problems that occur, that's the whole point of the alpha process. Releasing them as snapshots at particular points simplifies the process of installing for those interested in doing so.

The beta stage is where you would expect to find most of the major bugs quashed, since at that point the version freeze is in, no new packages will be added or upgraded, and everything is about dealing with the smaller bugs. Most users jump in at the beta stage and start trying it out then.

In fact, many distros don't even bother with alphas. They simply have some sort of a development pool of unstable packages, and then hit a point where those packages are frozen and betas are put together.

As it is, I've been running 10.2 since Alpha 4, and upgrading from the factory repo regularly so I was actually on "Alpha 5" at some point last week. Against all common sense, I'm actually using it as my day-to-day system and while there are a couple of annoyances (the kdesu bug is a PITA), it's extremely stable. Surprisingly, most of the problems I ran into were due to incorrectly packaged packages rather than software faults, and were usually resolved within a day or so. I'd go as far as to say 10.2 Alpha 5 is in better shape than the 10.1 I left. I'm also using KDE though, and from what I understand there have been considerably more problems with Gnome through the development process. Package management is much improved, although I yanked out the hideous zmd tool which still sucks and likely will for the rest of eternity.

So remember, this isn't a release for the general public. It's either for developers, users interested in being part of the troubleshooting process, or morons like me that irrationally insist on bleeding edge and have to deal with the inherent problems as they come up. There are absolutely no warantees or guarantees implied with development releases, so use at your own risk.

(the kdesu bug is a PITA),

This one also,suprisingly since 10.1 (retail) >

* zen-updater always shows patterns to update Bug #198379

Thanks for clarifying this for me.

When bugs are filed at https://bugzilla.novell.com they are catagorized depending on what version of the OS you're using and what the specific issue is. Duplicate bugs are removed or at least labled as duplicate and subsequently closed.

As for the reason to announce an Alpha, Beta or RC release is to allow the public a chance to test not just how the OS runs on their hardware but also how applications they use work with the OS.

How to guide for SUSE Linux users for video playback support.

http://www.linuxforum.com/forums/index.php/topic,87247.0.html

thanks for the link

According to this buglist
http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs#openSUSE_10.2_Alpha_...
there is a bug 210208:
"CD changing does not work, you cannot install with changing of physical media. (...) We will therefore release instead of CD images only a DVD iso!"
This is the real reason for not releasing CD isos.

Well, I hope they keep releasing DVD isos, at least if they want more beta testers.

Just try to keep in mind that bandwidth is not free and a few thousand people downloading one or two CDs is a lot cheaper than everyone downloading full DVDs.

That is true, but for a default KDE install you need 3 CDs.

In any case I don't want them to stop releasing CD isos, I want them to release DVD isos *as well*