FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 15:48 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:

> Wheee, double-sided pointless antagonism! Ah, the joys of fedora-devel
> in its most common, mostly-useless form.
> 
> In any case, it *is* a fairly obvious point in user interface design
> that giving users two identical choices that pop-up/run entirely different
> things is a horrible UI. It confuses the new user, makes writing coherent
> docs a mess, etc. I didn't really know that this was a debatable point.

I never said it was good. I said it was less bad than EXPECTING PEOPLE
TO TELEPATHICALLY DISCOVER THE EXISTENCE OF alsamixer.

What is the goal of good UI design? Happy users. Is a user who can't
hear any sound and doesn't know how the hell to fix it happy? No. Is
'good UI design that results in a non-functional system and a pissed-off
user' better than 'bad UI design that results in a functioning system
and a happier user'? No. You can't see the wood for the trees.

> Of course, I don't know that the proposed solution does this, since,
> a week after it was proposed, a week after we've cut our last milestone
> release, and less than two weeks before we cut the hopefully-to-be-shipped
> release candidate, this proposed solution *has yet to land in any form
> at all*. Given the stage of the schedule now, I find it pretty preposterous
> that we're still considering changing things.

I had gnome-alsamixer packaged and ready to go on Monday; it would have
been faster if things hadn't happened over a weekend where I was at a
conference. That's https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=497593 .

However, I then switched tracks to work on the old gnome-volume-control
instead. I did this because I'm trying to make as many people happy as
possible as opposed to just spending my time dug into my trench firing
at the opposition. Bastien said he'd prefer the old g-v-c, made some
good points, no-one contradicted them, so I took that on board and
worked on the old g-v-c code instead. This is substantially more complex
than packaging gnome-alsamixer, and I posted some progress messages to
which no-one replied or made any helpful suggestions or contributed any
fixes, but I persevered and had it ready the next day. That's
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498136 . It's sitting there
waiting to be approved now.

If other people had spent time contributing to this process while I was
busy as fuck hacking on two different packages, tracking down patches,
and simultaneously working with Lennart and a dozen end users to
generate and track useful bug reports on the volume issues, maybe it
would have gone faster. I am terribly terribly sorry that I wasn't quite
able to meet your schedule while I was working thirteen hours a day on
this issue.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net