PROPOSAL: Fedora user survey

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2010 12:23:42 +0100, Jaroslav wrote:

> Some people want to change update 
> policies/target of Fedora because of users, 

Not sure this is true.

> we don't know who are our user and 
> what they want.

Really? The users I see want "stuff that works". Preferably, they want the
stuff to work already after downloading and installing from a DVD image.
And they don't like it if an advertised Fedora release doesn't work out of
the box, whereas the previous release worked fine. And they don't like it,
if it takes many weeks for bug-fix updates to trickle in, while some
updates make things worse. I see users who are happy when they don't need
to submit problem reports. They don't care whether it is the very latest
or a somewhat older version, because they are consumers who expect the
package maintainers to create a product that works and in many cases they
don't even monitor upstream's release habits. If there is a reason not to
ship a latest release of some software, most users do accept that.

> Now someone wants to know who are our users/what our users 
> really want, we don't want to know it, because we don't want to do Fedora for 
> what users want or need, because we're developing Fedora for us. Funny ;-)

If you manage to ask a sufficiently large sample, great. Go ahead and do
it. Just don't set up a poll that would mostly be frequented by
hardcore-users, who are bored without a daily flood of 50+ updates and a
daily kernel update, while the majority of users doesn't participate. It
reminds me of distribution popularity polls, where that dist comes out on
top whose forum/mailing-list/blog readers are pestered the most.