Features in new releases / updates

[Matt McCutchen]

On Sat, 2010-05-22 at 10:14 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 20.05.2010 18:42, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > On Thu, 2010-05-20 at 14:25 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> >> I'd expect most of the support to end up in F13 updates, so I'm not
> >> sure a feature page really makes sense. 
> > This happens with a lot of our features anyway, [...]
> 
> And that imho is quite bad for everyone involved, as it kind of makes
> everyone unhappy afaics.
> 
> To explain: Journalists (even those that are familiar with Fedora) can't
> know each and every details of Fedora and thus rely on those feature
> pages quite a lot. So after reading
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KDE44 (¹) they might write (for
> example) something like "One of the new interesting things in Fedora 13
> is KDE 4.4" .
> 
> But most people that already use KDE and Fedora 12 will know: that's
> nothing new, I already got that version via updates weeks ago. So they
> will think "the journalists is not well informed, I don't need to read
> this article any further". Some might ever write to the journalist "you
> wrote crap, this is nothing new". So he might be angry with the Fedora
> project, as the information it provided misguided him. That might
> influence his writing for later releases, which is not what we want.

Has that ever actually happened?  As a Fedora user, I would tend to cut
journalists a lot of slack in the situation you describe.  The important
information is that the feature is a focus of current work and is worth
trying out if I think it might be useful to me; having the details of
availability in releases right is secondary.

Without addressing other reasons, I think keeping the situation simple
for journalists is a pretty weak reason not to add a feature to an
existing release via updates.

-- 
Matt