-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 03/24/2014 09:22 AM, lee wrote: > Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 08:34:55PM +0100, lee wrote: >>> I`m somewhat surprised that the feeling of apparent desinterest >>> of the makers of Fedora in what its users think seems kinda >>> widespread under its users. Perhaps it`s a wrong impression; >>> if not, it may be something for Fedora.next to address. >> >> I think it's unfair impression. Some of the developers only care >> about their own area, and perhaps the users of that thing but not >> the project overall, sure. But overall, we care very much. > > ... and time and resources are limited. > >> The catch is: it's hard to get a good sense of what the userbase >> as a whole thinks. It's easy to conflate that with "care about >> what some users are repeating very loudly on a mailing list". >> That's certainly _some_ input, but it's a skewed view of the >> actual world. >> >> Many of the better possible ways to measure are very expensive, >> but overall, there is one which is straightforward and effective: >> users who represent a large enough community will have some >> percentage of people willing and able to contribute by becoming >> Fedora developers, and those people guide the project through >> their actions. > > Are users making packages substantially different from users > giving input through a mailing list? In both cases, you have a > number of users, and some of them do something, i. e. are active on > the mailing list or are active by making packages. > > The ones making packages probably have more influence. Is it > supposed to be like that? > Frankly, yes. Feedback on a list is fine, but anyone can say "Hey, I wish it was more like this:", but ultimately it will be up to someone to actually implement that change. The ones who go and do the work are the ones who have the final say on what happens. If something is interesting or important enough to an individual, then they can decide to either implement it themselves or seek out the specific resources to do so for them (either by hiring a contractor or talking someone with the requisite skills into doing it for them). Very little change or improvement ever happens because a lot of people talked about doing something for years. Things change because someone actually goes and makes it happen. That's the culture we try to encourage in Fedora. Sometimes it means that a very dedicated group of individuals goes and implements something that a lot of people disagree with. When enough of those people disagree, someone will probably come forth and try to either fix or replace that subsystem. It happens with desktop environments, it happens with low-level system components and it's always going to be that way. >> That's why we have Gnome, KDE, LXDE, and MATE-Compiz desktop >> spins -- and, pointedly, not a fvwm one. If you really think that >> this is the best course for Fedora, I encourage you to step up >> and create one. (See >> <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Spins_Process>.) > > I don`t understand why every possible choice should require making > a distribution on it`s own. > You're confusing a spin with a distribution (and a product with a distribution). Both products and spins are curated sets of packages from a single distribution (Fedora). Each one has its own reason for existing (in the case of the desktop spins, it's basically to show off a particular piece of technology). For the Products, we're working to establish specific *solutions*. Recognizing that most people install an operating system so that, well, they can operate their system, we're trying to build solutions for three common use-cases so that newcomers to the Fedora Project don't feel like they need to make a thousand individual package choices to get their system running. There will always be people who want to do that, and we'll continue to cater to them by having the wider package set remain available (as well as the spins process so people who care enough can build new install-and-deployment media). >> Or, if that's not really you're thing, you could step back and >> focus on what you are suggesting is a bigger problem -- getting >> user input into Fedora. How could that be done better? Surveys? >> More user testing? An active "User Feedback SIG"? > > I think that a mailing list like this one can provide a lot of > input and that extracting it can be a problem. It`s not like all > package maintainers could read all posts here in order to figure > out what users might want. > Mailing lists are a *start*, but you also have to recognize that you're dealing with a self-selected set of responders. Specifically, the set of people on the fedora-users and fedora-devel mailing lists are generally people who are already enamored of Fedora and/or have been working with it for a long time. This is traditionally a set of people who have established their own ways of working around (and sometimes mentally blocking) some of the more painful parts of the Fedora experience. Put another way, limiting our source of input to the mailing list would be fundamentally equivalent to devising a project's budget estimate by only talking to the engineers. By not talking to marketing, quality-assurance, capital expenditures, facilities, etc., you'd come up with an inaccurate view. > Surveys might be a good idea, though someone would have to put > them together, and someone would have to extract the information > from them. Both of that isn`t easily done, either. > Right, and doing that properly (with an appropriate sample size as well as controls, such as users who have never used Fedora before) pretty much requires outsourcing to a professional research group, which costs $BIGNUM. > How do you currently find out what users want? > In my experience, we almost never find out what users want. We *often* hear after the fact what they don't like, but we rarely if ever hear recommendations ahead of time. Furthermore, users are often REALLY BAD at knowing what they actually want. I've had people come to me and demand an option to disable SSL/TLS from some of my software. When they were pushed back on, it was ultimately discovered that they needed more transactions-per-second than they were getting and their simple experiments suggested that avoiding encryption would get it for them. We were able to do some profiling and bring the encrypted connections up to the performance they needed. The moral here is that what they asked for and what they needed were not the same thing. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlMwWC8ACgkQeiVVYja6o6My0ACeI5huM9RA4yr2DJZxmz8sm5Qa QAwAnRhrR1Kf5a+zNH/VayTKGKkda6Nj =gohw -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
