Update question: some user data

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2010-03-06 at 15:00 -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:

> I don't think people realize what they're asking for.  I'll just defer to
> my favorite Ford quote:
> 
> "If I had asked my customers what they wanted," Ford said, "they would
> have said a faster horse."

I don't think that's quite apt. The point of Ford's famous quotation is
essentially that asking people what they want is not a good way to
_innovate_, which is certainly true.

That's not what we're doing here, though. We do not have some incredibly
innovative update system under consideration that no-one's ever thought
of before. We're having an argument between two known systems which are
already in use by various other distributions (and ourselves), and
reasonably well-understood by many people. That's really a rather
different situation.

> The best part of all of this is, it doesn't matter anymore.  We've let
> Fedora go completely directionless for years now.  If we listen to the
> users, they'll all tell us different things.  

That's what I find interesting about this poll; they aren't. A large
majority are telling us one specific thing.

> Especially if you get a
> sample size large enough (your poll isn't anywhere near large enough to be
> scientific which is why you called it unscientific :)

I agree, yet so far it's all the numbers we have, and I'm not
particularly comfortable with saying 'well it doesn't agree with what I
think, so I'll declare it unscientific and ignore it'...given that
neither choice has any intrinsic 'correctness', I'm not sure there's a
reasonable basis for making the choice other than the overall desires of
the project. Now, how we weight the desires of development versus the
desires of releng versus the desires of QA versus the desires of FESco
versus the desires of the Board versus the desires of the users...that's
a tricky question. It's at least worth making some kind of effort to
assess the desires of users, though, and I don't think we can entirely
write off the results because they may be inconvenient.

At the very least, several people argued in the thread that users don't
really believe being bleeding-edge is a part of Fedora and don't
actively want adventurous updates, which becomes rather harder to argue
now.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net