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And worse still, pushing out a version simply just to meet a 'delivery date' - many parts of Ubuntu are clearly very rough around the edge; if I was in the position of the project manager, I would have atleast waited until 2.18.2 had been released, merged it into it, then pushed off a couple of RC's; thus reducing the number of upstream related bugs that needed to be corrected.



But part of being a distributor is about fixing the errors which your 'customers' or 'user base' find - if there is a bug which crashes an application whilst doing a normal task - ripping audio within soundjuicer for instance; whose responsibility is it? should the distro just ship it to meet a time line knowing full well it has applications which aren't up to scratch in terms of quality?

If one is not going to fix those errors, then why even have a beta testing phase? with Windows, what ever appears within their product, out of the box, they support - and that includes the technologies they've licenced off other companies - you don't hear them say, "sorry, not our problem, we've pushed the bug upstream, so you'll just have to put up with the security hole for now" - of course not.

I'm not getting at you personally, but at the distributors who think that they can fob off the responsibility onto someone else, and merely just bundle up applications without taking any responsibility for what goes into the distribution and the quality of it.

It is called risk management and priorities. Every bug does not have to be fixed in order for a release to be made. That is why they are prioritized as blocker/critical/etc... I can not think of a single distribution that holds a release till all known bugs are solved.

You disagree with the line Ubuntu makes, so be it. Use another distro, it is not a one size fits all world. I use Ubuntu and Debian for now out of preference. Neither are perfect but they get the job done for me. If another distribution works better for you, great. I do not delineate what I dislike in every distro I have used because I realize that all are compromises to fit the personalities involved in the creation. I actively dislike Suse, but realize there are others who swear by it.

"And worse still, pushing out a version simply just to meet a 'delivery date'"

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. When they did delay a release people complained about that, now when they release on schedule people complain about that.

There's nothing wrong with a fixed release schedule (works great for OpenBSD) as long as you plan for it.