Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Stuart Herbert <stuart@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: GLEP 42 "Critical News Reporting" Round Two
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2005 22:22:54
Message-Id: 1131747595.8508.71.camel@mogheiden.gnqs.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: GLEP 42 "Critical News Reporting" Round Two by Grobian
1 On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 10:03 +0100, Grobian wrote:
2 > Ok, you want a reaction, because you are Feeling Blue[1], right.
3
4 The only reaction I want is for us to meet the goals that I have set
5 out, instead of trying to move those goals.
6
7 > You describe here (and in your diary) the aim to reach 100% of our user
8 > base. Wow, nice thing. Discussions on whether you will succeed or not,
9 > are out of the question right now, it's just your aim. Good. I hope
10 > you will succeed!
11
12 Thanks.
13
14 > I scoured the forums a bit and looked what users were telling. I wasn't
15 > surprised. What do you expect from a user telling it all doesn't work
16 > any more, who doesn't run etc-update just because "after every emerge
17 > --upgrade --world it has over 100 files to update"? Such user just
18 > ignores the importance of the tool, and will most certainly ignore
19 > anything else that we try to help this user. This was just one example.
20
21 When we have emerge --news done, and users come along and complain that
22 they didn't know about something, then *maybe* we have some moral high
23 ground to stand on.
24
25 Personally, I don't care for the whole approach of moral high ground on
26 this one.
27
28 Gentoo's not just a cool toy. We're also responsible to delivering the
29 best we can for our users. I'd like to think that includes the best
30 news.
31
32 > It is a very humble attempt to try and help these users, but they simply
33 > chose the wrong Linux distro, because Gentoo expects you to be an system
34 > administrator, not a user. At least that's my vision on it. I think we
35 > can agree that Gentoo requires a user to know/realise more than a
36 > Fedora/SuSe/Ubuntu user.
37
38 I agree that the required knowledge level is higher than certain other
39 distros. But I don't think experience or ability is the issue. I don't
40 believe that experience or ability has anything to do with whether or
41 not that person keeps up to date with important Gentoo news.
42
43 Even if a user keeps up with the news, there will be lapses due to
44 sickness, holiday, pressure of other tasks, and so on. One of the nice
45 benefits of emerge --news is that the news will be there for them when
46 they need it.
47
48 > I am just in the opinion that we lack a system where users can find the
49 > information they need.
50
51 Agreed, but there's no way that every user (or even a majority of users)
52 will take the trouble to go looking for that information. I'm making
53 that assertion partly on common-sense, and partly on my experience of
54 running a F/OSS project back in the mid-nineties.
55
56 I think this is where it'd help if Gentoo had some way of working out
57 the install base, and comparing that to some meaningful stats from
58 www.g.o et al, so that we could have a discussion based on facts that
59 could stand up to scrutiny from both sides.
60
61 However, we don't really have a way atm that I know about to get either
62 of these stats. Maybe infra could do some rsyncd log analysis to put
63 together a rough guestimate, and maybe the GDP could post some useful
64 stats from www.g.o as I've twice asked for now.
65
66 There again, maybe we don't really want those stats. Who knows - they
67 might show that our userbase is nowhere near the size we think it is :)
68
69 > Here comes the point where I can express my doubt about the 100%. There
70 > are unfortunately users who are too hard to help, if you get what I
71 > mean.
72
73 I agree. But at least we will have done our best, which I'd like to
74 think is what having that nice @gentoo.org email address is all about.
75
76 > As you might guess
77 > from my comment above, I simply think _communication_ is the big
78 > problem, as I see being a problem in many places around here.
79
80 I think that covers a multitude of sins though. I'm not trying to fix
81 them all. I just want to fix this one problem at a time.
82
83 The one I'm concerned with is ensuring that the news we already generate
84 reaches all of our users. That's all I care about right now. I don't
85 actually care whether it's done by emerge --news; I will happily support
86 a more effective solution.
87
88 > Not that perfect communication solves the problem entirely, but it allows to
89 > reply in the sense of 'rtfw'.
90
91 rtfn, surely? :)
92
93 > If you're serious here, feel free to contact me (off-list) to see what
94 > we can arrange.
95
96 Drop into #gentoo-apache and let's talk :)
97
98 Best regards,
99 Stu
100 --
101 Stuart Herbert stuart@g.o
102 Gentoo Developer http://www.gentoo.org/
103 http://stu.gnqs.org/diary/
104
105 GnuGP key id# F9AFC57C available from http://pgp.mit.edu
106 Key fingerprint = 31FB 50D4 1F88 E227 F319 C549 0C2F 80BA F9AF C57C
107 --

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