Developers responsibillity to Fedora Users

[Andrew Haley]

On 09/28/2011 12:37 PM, Craig White wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 11:39 +0100, Andrew Haley wrote:
>> On 09/28/2011 11:12 AM, Craig White wrote:
>>> Just look at the feedback on the new Macintosh OS X Lion or Windows 8
>>> preview... there is a lot of griping about the changes to the UI. It's
>>> certain that regardless of the OS, changes to the UI will always raise a
>>> bunch of complaints and the more drastic the changes, the louder the
>>> complaints. That's not really surprising.
>>
>> No, but I think the controversy around GNOME 3 is of a different order
>> from what we've seen before.  This is not just the usual bunch of
>> complaints.
> ----
> because you say so?
> 
> seems to me exactly the same type of complaints when KDE 4 was released

Perhaps so, but I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this.

>> When Linus Torvalds says "I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet
>> to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3" the problem
>> has to be taken seriously.  (It's not just Linus, but he's a leading
>> developer who represents the views of many developers.)
> ----
> and Linux has a point of view that is entirely his own and certainly
> valid for him. Why would you assert that his views represent anything
> other than his views? Heck, he's typically involved in disagreement even
> with kernel development and the kernel license so what's new here?

This sort of feedback from any active developer shouldn't be ignored.
Maintaining developer mindshare is important for Fedora.

> Those who are unwilling or unprepared to use leading edge software,
> still under development should probably be using something stable like

I think you're missing the point.  A major goal of any leading-edge
distro is to get feedback from users on new features.  In other words,
getting negative feedback from users isn't a bug, it's a feature.

> RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux, Ubuntu LTS, Debian or something other
> than Fedora. If you are committed to using Fedora, you are committed to
> using it warts and all with the expectation that you are helping to
> drive the open source universe forward.

If Fedora (and free software in general) is to improve then we need
feedback from users.  That's how it has always worked, and how it's
supposed to work.  We need people to complain when Fedora does things
they don't like.  We actively solicit feedback, and we welcome it,
even if we don't like it.

Andrew.