Update question: some user data

[Doug Ledford]

On 03/08/2010 11:05 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 10:27 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>>
>> Le Sam 6 mars 2010 20:04, Adam Williamson a écrit :
>>
>>> The numbers do surprise me, to be honest. As I write this, it's 34-8 -
>>> that's over 80% - in favour of 'adventurous' updates.
>>
>> Advanced users (those most likely to want a more stable rawhide to use it as
>> primary system) use irc, mailing lists, bugzilla, etc. Normal users (those
>> that need a stable Fedora so they can spend their time writing apps, doing
>> i18n, etc) do not read Fedora forums (if they had this kind of time they would
>> not object to adventurous time-wasting updates).
> 
> I don't think that's an assertion you have any kind of evidence to
> support.

Well, I stand as a data point that matches this assertion (although you
could leave out the rhetoric about advanced users and all, the data
point of "people that use Fedora to get work done" versus "people that
user Fedora to tinker" I think is probably a fairly accurate assessment
of what people might or might not be found on Fedora Forums).

> It's really quite sad that half the people who've responded to
> the poll have done so by attempting to poke holes in it, as it happens
> not to line up with what they think.

That's not fair.  Yes, many have poked holes in the poll, but to be
fair, as you said, it's unscientific and it *does* have holes in its
methodology.

> If you think the poll is wrong - provide some data to disprove it.

I'm sorry, but that's a scientifically specious argument.  Invalid data
doesn't become valid because there is no valid counter data.  It is
valid or invalid all on its own.  To date, no one has run a
scientifically valid poll, but that doesn't make your poll any better or
worse, it just makes it all by itself.

> Counteracting it with yet more assertions built on precisely no evidence
> is not convincing.

Well, one of the questions to be asked before going any further on this
is what audience do we care about?  I've heard it over and over again
that Fedora is supposed to be a developer's platform, and not a user's
platform.  If that's true, then the people that should be voting on this
is the people that make Fedora, not the people that consume it.  If the
reverse is true, then it really doesn't matter what the users vote
anyway because then it's up to us to decide *which* user segment we wish
to target and build the OS to satisfy them.

So, are we an OS for the developer or for the user?  If the developer,
then the poll as it stands is prima fascia broken because the Fedora
Forums user base does not directly map to the active fedora developer
base.  If we are an OS for the developer, then the poll should require a
Fedora Account System login to vote, not a Fedora Forums login.

If we are an OS for the user, then as I mention, voting is kind of
pointless as that just says what user base we *have*, not what we could
have or want to have.  We would simply decide which niche we wanted to
fill and then fill it.

Now, as for the wording.  It was both subjective and vague.  Neither of
those leads to a good poll without at a minimum putting in additional
questions to narrow down responses.  As an example of why I call it
subjective and vague, I could have worded the same "adventurous" and
"conservative" options as "gratuitous" and "reasonable", and I have no
doubt that this wording change would effect the results of the poll (and
probably drastically so).  To be a valid poll, we have to be precise
enough that people know what they are voting on without the wording
leading their thoughts.

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
              GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
	      http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs available at
	      http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband

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