my thoughts on package management

[Robert LeBlanc]

(Apologies for the previous partial post :)

>At 13:20 2003/07/24, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
>>On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 16:12, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
>>
>>I find these conversations on mailing lists a bit frustrating, because
>>some people will join in and be very vocal about their specific needs,
>>which may or may not match what 99% of people use.  [not focusing this
>>at Rober specifically, but in general].   How can we, as possible
>>contributors to the new Red Hat Linux Project, really get a feel for
>>what the majority of people want?  If only the most vocal come to the
>>mailing lists, or bugzilla, and make their specific needs know, won't
>>the silent majority be ignored?

The trouble, I suppose, is that unless you take a stab at defining what the 
silent majority likes/wants, people posting to mailing lists like this one 
won't know ahead of time whether their wishlists are "already spoken for" 
or "clearly in the minority".  Trying to do that would just ensure that you 
get no useful feedback from anyone, since the ones who see their views 
already represented in your list won't feel the need to say anything, and 
the ones who *don't* see their views represented will get the impression 
that their views aren't welcome.

It's also typically the case that for any group of people sharing an 
opinion or view, there'll be someone from that group who speaks up to 
represent them.  When one person posts to a mailing list like this, there's 
no easy way to tell how many people she's representing.  That one poster 
could be (unconsciously) representing a concern that hundreds or thousands 
of other people share, in the proverbial "tip of the iceberg" 
scenario.  Just because the more vocal people on the list don't share that 
poster's concerns doesn't mean those concerns aren't represented in that 
"silent majority" out there.

 From my perspective as an old-time sysadmin, I find it hard to imagine 
that I'm truly the only one with this particular view, or that this view is 
shared by only a negligibly small portion of the Linux-using 
market.  Rather, I suspect that most of those who share my concerns have 
simply written off Red Hat entirely already, on the theory that they'll 
"look at it again if/when Red Hat fixes 
<insert-problematic-feature-here>".  They remain pessimistic about their 
ability to effect changes, and are quite used to having to do things on 
their own (i.e. "the old way"), so coming to lists like this to speak up 
with feature requests is not first- or second-nature to them, and thus they 
fulfill their own prophecies.  They (like myself) will likely continue to 
deploy RHL on workstations, but will continue to avoid it in the server 
room.  This might not be a problem to Red Hat, if indeed the company's 
focus remains on the desktop market, but from what I've seen of their 
marketing materials they also seem eager to compete at the enterprise level 
as well, so this *should* be a concern to them in that case.  Have they 
polled enterprise sysadmins lately?

Unfortunately comments like the one quoted above are virtually guaranteed 
to stifle input from anyone who fears their concerns might be too divergent 
from what they perceive the "silent majority" to want.  Such comments 
create an atmosphere that suggests that the spectrum of acceptable opinion 
is rather narrow, and that outside views are undesirable and unwelcome.

Robert LeBlanc