Eugenia Loli's Journal: Foresight Linux, the champion of bugs

My friend Thom is jumping up and down for Foresight Linux usually, and so I decided to have a second look yesterday, downloading a VMWare image of their latest 0.9.4 'stable' release that included Gnome 2.14 in it.

I found about 30 bugs in about one hour of using the system. Some of them are usability bugs, some are just personal irks, but about 15 of them are real hardcore bugs.

In fact, I am a proud finder of a huge security hole that I discovered on Gnome's fast-user-switch 2.14.0 applet. This is the first security bug I ever found, IIRC. Anyways, I emailed James who is the maintainer of the applet, he replied soon enough and he will possibly look into this (I'll be watching).

But what really bugs me is that Foresight Linux's bugs I found are easily detectable with a simple SMOKETESTING. Don't these people care about their project? Don't they see these reproducible errors, crashes, freezes, whatever? I have to state the following in capitals, I am sorry:

IF A PIECE OF SOFTWARE DOESN'T PASS SMOKETESTING, DON'T BLOODY RELEASE IT.

No matter if your software is marketed as "bleeding edge" or not, there is a difference between having some bugs here and there and not pass smoketesting. This is the difference between a Beta/RC version and an eternal Alpha. Who wants to use Alpha software? Surely not someone who respects him/herself.