On 05/03/2010 10:01 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 01:58 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>>> It was none of that. All it gave us was info we already had. Some users
>>> would like more adventurous stuff, while some users would not. We already
>>> had that information, the poll told us nothing new.
>>
>> Now you may try to argue that the sample is biased, but you have no actual
>> evidence towards that.
>
> Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent
> the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a
> worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
Besides the statistical bias, I think this poll is flawed because it is
sensitive to how the issue is worded, and even how people perceive the
question; it's like those 'push polls' in politics. Consider those three
formulations (*):
- would you like more adventurous stuff in Fedora, to take advantage
of improvements and fixes in the installed software
- would you like more adventurous stuff, even if it sometimes
introduced regressions
- knowing that sooner or later it will totally break your system,
would you like more adventurous stuff
The results will be different for each question. They will also strongly
depend on the cohort you will be asking. I am convinced that general
users will be more conservative than the Fedora developers, who might
answer 'yes' even to the third question, because they know enough to
have a fighting chance to recover their systems.
An average user wants a stable, working software distribution, with
prompt patches and software enhancements. Since in general those are
conflicting requirements, the Fedora community has to apply engineering
judgement on what is the appropriate velocity of updates. I personally
like the processes and infrastructure that Fedora built to manage the
updates, even though I have seen that they don't prevent broken software
from getting in. My conclusion is to make it better,
not jettison it.
p
(*) I tried to bias the wording to show the range of possible
interpretation, so please don't call me out on trolling. The third
formulation, while admittedly alarmist, isn't completely unrealistic:
c.f. the recent scary bug with a localization interaction that ended up
removing large amount of packages, including yum IIRC.
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