Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, "Why?")

[lee]

Bill Oliver <vendor at billoblog.com> writes:

> On Sun, 23 Mar 2014, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>
>> Tim wrote:
>>
>>[snip]
>> But all this is pure speculation.
>> One of the weaknesses of Fedora, in my view,
>> is the apparent lack of interest in what users actually want or need.
>>
>>[snip]
>
>
> I don't think it's a total lack of interest.  I think that it's an
> issue of prioritization.  From what I've read, the purpose of Fedora
> is to use the open source community to examine and debug things for
> potential inclusion in the Red Hat Enterprise products.

The mission statement says otherwise.

> Accordingly, it is our "job" to get stuck with stuff we don't like and
> things that are not quite ready for prime time.

Wouldn`t it be more efficient to listen to what users want than it is to
do lots of work to throw things in to see whether the users like them or
not?

> My impression is that Red Hat is *very* interested in what we put in
> bugzilla, and *is* interested in usability and preference issues from
> us -- but that the debugging part is first, usability second, and
> preference third in the priority list.

Bug reports are surely important, and the ones I made have been attended
to.  They are bug reports, though, i. e. you can say things like "I
wanted to do this, so I tried to do that, and instead of getting X, the
program crashed."  That is a limit.

Some things you can only learn from discussions like this or from
actually asking the users, and bug reports aren`t suited for that.

A reason for perceiving the apparent lack of interest may be that the
makers of Fedora don`t appear to be present here.  It is here where
people ask questions, including usability issues, and come up with ideas
and can say what they would like to see.

> Using Fedora is like getting a big box of presents every six months
> sent to me by a rather absent-minded elderly aunt, who can't quite
> remember my tastes.  The good part is that it is a big box full of
> neat stuff.  The bad part is that some of it got broken in the mail
> and some of it I just don't care for.  But I throw the stuff I don't
> like away and enjoy playing with the stuff I like.

That`s a good analogy :)  Is it supposed to be like this?

Let`s see: Your aunt is running a bug tracking system to keep track of
what got broken in the mail so she can resend what got broken, plus a
mailing list so their grandsons and granddaughters can chat about what
they got this time to figure out whether it is actually broken or not.

If she had known that she didn`t need to throw in this or that, wouldn`t
that be easier for everyone?


-- 
Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)