Le Mar 8 août 2006 13:14, Paul W. Frields a écrit : >> We have a great product. That needs promoting and user feed back. > > The first is what Marketing is for. The second is what Bugzilla is for. I strongly disagree. 1. The weight of a Fedora bugzilla report is pretty low, 2. A lot of Fedora packagers consider it's not their job to push user reports upstream. 3. Using upstream bugzilla is asking to be ignored - any feature evolution (and usability fixes are always considered feature evolutions) will be discussed in mailing lists/irc channels by developpers between themselves. Not in the bugzilla where the reporter can follow the discussion. Then when the user complains after a few months he'll be informed the decision was taken somewhere else without leaving him any opportunity to make his case or asking seriously fo his input. (and you and I know old bugzilla bugs will be ignored forever, since if they were important, someone would have acted on them before) Which means any problematic interaction between app A, B and C (typical usability problem) requires users: 1. to be able to locate the A, B, C forums where usability is discussed 2. to join them, learn the mood and discussion conventions 3. to convince A, B, C to work together (with zero credentials "just basic user report"), probably at an inconvenient date for upstream ie requires a *lot* of time, communication skills, mastery of technical english, etc Practically that means that without any group support a user report will go nowhere. Even if he found a perfectly valid problem. Distributions which create usability SIGs are able to influence upstream evolution the way their users need. They help formalise user reports in clean technical english. They are able to gather data and numbers that can not be waved away like an individual user-level report often is if upstream deems it inconvenient. Distributions which don't are only represented by their developpers, who are supposed to represent distro users but in practice only push their personal agenda (which may be good or bad but has often little in common with the wishes of users) No usability group gave us most of the UI gems of early GNOME 2, and an awful lot of the bad reputation GNOME and Fedora still suffer from (GNOME is not Fedora but Fedora/Red Hat people were certainly major players in the decision making process then). Till Fedora developpers/maintainers consider usability problems bugs (to be fixed) and not "enhancements" (to be ignored at will), someone else needs to mediate between Fedora users and all the upstreams Fedora distributes. Lastly this kind of group is a major generator of user goodwill - "let the users engage upstream alone" leads to the kind of Fedora-bashing articles we've seen lately. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
