Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v5)
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 7:46 PM, Jason D. Clinton m...@jasonclinton.com wrote: On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 15:38, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Unfortunately, it seems this is not going to be blessed by GNOME, and questionpro.com only allows 10 questions in the free version. I haven't found a better free online survey, and unless somebody offers hosting for this survey, it would have to be limited. Google Docs Spreadsheets has a survey system built in to it called Forms. It allows anonymous respondents. Actually, it will be hosted on Phoronix. One problem raised was the issue of self-selection bias, of course, without any suggestions to get rid of it. That's false. I gave you two strategies: You can mitigate this problem by offering a survey that appears to have nothing to do with the subject matter that you're really looking for an answer on so that you get a truly random sampling of Linux users. You also must be careful not to recruit people to take the survey from communities which will contain angry people. For example, going to forums to find people to take a survey automatically selectively biases from people who were likely there to solve some kind of problem and are so already in a particular state of mind.[1] Those strategies are unactionable. In this interconnected world one cannot choose who doesn't get a piece of information. And you still haven't addressed the biased question phrasing in questions 2 and 3. Yes I have, according to the suggestions proposed. I you have a suggestion, go ahead. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v5)
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 23:38 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: Here's the next version of the survey. Unfortunately, it seems this is not going to be blessed by GNOME, and questionpro.com only allows 10 questions in the free version. I haven't found a better free online survey, and unless somebody offers hosting for this survey, it would have to be limited. [snip] What about other kinds of bias? Would the survey be invalidated if we missed some group of people? Please look up non-response bias. It's been shown that, in some cases, the group of respondents (and non-respondents) can be inherently biased. It's reasonable to suspect that polarized opinions could affect people's proclivity to respond. People's proclivity to respond is called self-selection bias, and it's tackled with the question What is the main reason you are taking this survey?, if people respond Somebody is pushing me, we can identify people without such proclivity and measure the bias of self-selected people. As for non-response bias, I am aware of it, and I am doing all I can to mitigate it. You cannot even begin to deal with non-response bias unless you know the non-response rate. And you have no idea what the non-response rate is if you have an open-invitation survey on the Internet. We don't need to know the exact non-response rate, studies have shown it's not that important[1]. --- As a result of these and other such recent findings, it now seems clear that a low response rate does not guarantee lower survey accuracy and instead simply indicates a risk of lower accuracy. --- Now. Do you actually have a suggestion? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_rate -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
GNOME user survey 2011 (v6)
Hi, Since I have been effectively banned from desktop devel (my posts take two weeks to be moderated), I am sending this mail personally to people that have been active in the development. Michael Larabel has offered to host the survey in the Phoronix site, so I have been able to bring back many questions and not limit it to 10. I have incorporated all the suggestions and haven't had received any more in a while, so I think this is ready to go. I say we should launch it before the weekend, probably on Wednesday. Michael, is there anything else I need to do to help you put it on Phoronix? As usual, it's hosted here: https://gist.github.com/gists/1128166 Cheers. GNOME user survey 2011 === 01. Do you know what GNOME is? === [single choice] * Yes [skip to 03] * No === 02. Which of the following best resemble your desktop? === (click to see the image) [single choice] - Windows http://origin.arstechnica.com/images/windows7/Peek%20-%20Before.png - Mac OS X http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/firstrun/macosx103.png - GNOME 2 http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.28/figures/gnome-2.28.png.en - GNOME 3 http://gnome3.org/img/overview-big.png - Unity http://static.arstechnica.com/shell-windows.png - KDE http://www.linuxnov.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/KDE-4-7-desktop.jpg - I can't tell === 03. Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME? === [single choice] * not at all * barely * halfway * mostly * completely === 04. Does GNOME do what you want? === [single choice] * not at all * barely * halfway * mostly * completely === 05. How satisfied are you with GNOME in regards to == [matrix] Columns: not at all / barely / halfway / mostly / completely + ease of use + documentation + language availability + accessibility + community === 06. How are you taking this survey? === [single choice, with other] * Completely on my own * Somebody is pushing for me to do it * I am acting on behalf of somebody else * Other === 07. How old are you? (years) === [numeric] === 08. How long have you been using GNOME? (years) === [numeric] === 09. How many years of experience do you have using computers? === [numeric] === 10. How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === [single choice] * better * no changes * worse * cannot say === 11. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === [multiple choice, with other] + 3.2 + 3.0 + 2.x + I don't know + I'm not using it currently + other, please specify === 12. Where do you run GNOME? === [multiple choice, with other] + Desktop + Laptop + Netbook + Tablet === 13. How often do you use a terminal/console? == [single choice] * What is that? * When I have no other option * I can't live without them * Is there anything else? === 14. Have you contributed to the GNOME project? === [single choice] * Yes * No === 15. Have you contacted the GNOME team? === [single choice] * Yes, successfully * Yes, unsuccessfully * No, I don't know how * No, never had the need === 16. Which other desktop environments have you used in recent years? == [multiple choice, with other] + KDE + Unity + XFCE + LXDE + Enlightenment + other (please specify) === 17. Are you using some window arrangement extension on top of GNOME? == (e.g. Compiz + plugins, Awesome TWM + GNOME, etc) [single choice, with other] * No, pure GNOME * GNOME + Compiz window arrangement plugins * I don't know * Other (please specify) === 18. If you could change three things in GNOME, what would they be? === [free form] === 19. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? === [free form] -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v6)
On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 11:05 PM, Ionut Biru io...@archlinux.ro wrote: I didn't participate to this discussion before but i think the survey is pointless now because GNOME 3 wasn't presented to users at all. From the top 10 mainstream distributions, conform distrowatch, only 2 of them have gnome 3.0. In my opinion this survey should be published after gnome 3.2 is presented to a larger audience, now that ubuntu 11.10 is going to have it, opensuse 12.1 That would be what? December? I think that's too far, perhaps for the 2012 survey. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
GNOME user survey 2011 (v5)
Hi, Here's the next version of the survey. Unfortunately, it seems this is not going to be blessed by GNOME, and questionpro.com only allows 10 questions in the free version. I haven't found a better free online survey, and unless somebody offers hosting for this survey, it would have to be limited. Now, there has been a misconception that I am not listening to some feedback, which is not true. From my point of view there have been two kinds of feedback: a) Criticism to improve the survey All these comments have been addressed in one form or another. Unfortunately, I am forced to drop some of the suggested questions to fit the 10 question limit. Further criticism is still welcome. b) Criticism without possibility for improvements Many people in this category have already accepted that they don't think an online user survey is actually possible, so there's really no way to address these. One problem raised was the issue of self-selection bias, of course, without any suggestions to get rid of it. All online surveys have this issue, however, my proposal was actively suggest people to push others to take the survey (those people would not be self-selected), and have a question to identify them. Then we can ignore the self-selected people, or have two analyses. Of course, I didn't get any response. In a private discussion, Matthew Garret pointed out that there's still the issue that some people might not have friends, and thus there wouldn't be people to push them to take the survey. While this is true, this is something not even professionals can overcome, the only thing possible is to make a guess about the amount of people in this category, and thus the amount of bias. What about other kinds of bias? Would the survey be invalidated if we missed some group of people? No. There's a process called poststratification that would allow us to make valid guesses. Yes, it might turn out that in the end we don't have enough statistical power to make any conclusions, but we won't be able to say that until we get the results. Another misconception is that this survey might cause some damage, by drawing the wrong conclusions. As I already explained before, raw data is raw data, and it can't cause damage. What can cause damage is to make decisions based on wrong conclusions, which is why GNOME developers might want to ignore the conclusions. Or different people might try to do different post-hoc power analysis to try to get some consensus on what conclusions are actually valid. I will continue to listen for suggestions for improvement, but I fear GNOME developers don't want to continue improving this survey in this mailing list, so feel free to contact me personally if you are interested in v6 (if needed), or follow this: https://gist.github.com/1128166 Cheers. === 01. Which of the following best resemble your desktop? === (click to see the image) (in case you are not sure what GNOME is) [single choice] - Windows http://origin.arstechnica.com/images/windows7/Peek%20-%20Before.png - Mac OS X http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/firstrun/macosx103.png - GNOME 2 http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.28/figures/gnome-2.28.png.en - GNOME 3 http://gnome3.org/img/overview-big.png - Unity http://static.arstechnica.com/shell-windows.png - KDE http://www.linuxnov.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/KDE-4-7-desktop.jpg - I can't tell === 02. Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME? === [single choice] * not at all * barely * halfway * mostly * completely === 03. Does GNOME do what you want? === [single choice] * not at all * barely * halfway * mostly * completely === 04. What is the main reason you are taking this survey? === [single choice, with other] * Somebody is pushing me * I want to provide feedback to the project * I feel I have to * Other === 05. How many years of experience do you have using computers? === [numeric] === 06. How often do you use a terminal/console? == [single choice] * What is that? * When I have no other option * I can't live without them * Is there anything else? === 07. Have you contributed to the GNOME project? === [single choice] * Yes * No === 08. Have you contacted the GNOME team? === [single choice] * Yes, successfully * Yes, unsuccessfully * No, I don't know how * No, never had the need === 09. If you could change three things in GNOME, what would they be? === [free form] === 10. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? === [free form] -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Where is the data?
On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 8:03 PM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Sat, 2011-08-20 at 18:09 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 6:02 PM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Sat, 2011-08-20 at 14:43 +0200, Tomasz Torcz wrote: I think his objections were justified. There is really no raw data at those URLs. Except Allan never claimed he was providing raw data. In fact, he explicitly said that he does not do write-ups of user tests. So what's the point of replying to a mail asking specifically for data? When somebody asks me for something I don't have, I usually respond telling them so, and explaining why I don't have it. I think it's rude to ignore people. Well, that's true, but he claimed there was lots of data. I think that was an exaggeration. I also do user tests when working on the help. I also don't do write-ups. I fix problems or I pass information on to those who are in a position to fix the problems. Just because I don't publish reports doesn't mean I don't do user tests. And the constant assertions that nobody is looking at feedback are getting a bit insulting. User tests, like surveys, are not perfect and can be both misleading, and not significant enough. You're right, of course. All methods have flaws. But user testing, at least, gives results that are personal and actionable. When I get results like all 5 users were uncertain where to click when instructed to click the 'user menu', I know what to do. I have no idea what to do with 63% of respondents report they are less happy than they were a year ago. Yes, that kind of user testing gives you clear short-term actions, but it doesn't tell you if people happy with the whole system overall. It doesn't tell you if you are missing something essential, nor does it tell you when you are bleeding user-base. But you missed my point, my point is that they can be improved through *collaboration*, you publicize them, and people make suggestion to improve them. If those tests are to be taken seriously, they should be published so that they can be scrutinized, otherwise they are not evidence of anything, not to the rest of the world. I agree there are problems with transparency. A lot of things get done on IRC, because high-bandwidth communication is great for rapid development. I've been a strong supporter of public logs for IRC. I think we should discuss ways to better record what we do and the decisions we make. Indeed. But, I don't want to be in a situation where we have to wait for committees to scrutinize data and approve proposals before we can make changes. That sounds like an awful project to write software for. I don't think anybody is proposing that. All people are looking for is some public record. Just by doing that you might realize that perhaps you didn't have such strong reasons to switch to something as much as you were thinking, after all. Also, people could tell you; you are misinterpreting the results _there_. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Where is the data?
2011/8/20 Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl: On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 06:46:15PM +0200, Giovanni Campagna wrote: Still, if bug #123456 is more voted than bug #654321, it may be worth dedicating some more design hours to the former than to the latter, investigating the reasons, providing evidence, doing tests, etc. Then, maybe the bug will still be closed NOTABUG/WONTFIX, but it will be given a response proportional to the number of people reporting it. Because voting just gets a small number of people involved, results in distractions (why isn't this fixed yet; has XXX votes) Just ignore them if you don't care about them. , only technical users get involved and that it just is not seen by any significant amount of users I will not enable voting. It does more harm than good. Whoa! Wait a second. How do you jump from only technical users get involved to it does more harm than good. Technical users are still users, right? If you get 0 votes, that at least gives you something, specially compared to another bug report that has 1000 votes. At the end of the day you might decide to go for the one that has 0 votes, because it's easier, but at least you know, there's that bug report over there that more than a couple people *definitely* care about. This is also on bugzilla.mozilla.org. Most voted bug at one point had 700 or so votes. That is about 1000 times off from what I find noteworthy. Again, you can ignore the votes if you want, or you can assign your own scale, but the point is, that a vote with 700 or so votes is certainly more likely to be important that one with 0 votes. Personally, I have had great success with bug reporting voting on my projects, and seems to match pretty much the feedback I receive through other methods. But I'm not going to try to convince you, I'm sure there's no objective measure that would change your mind. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Federico Mena Quintero feder...@ximian.com wrote: On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 18:35 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: What do you think? Keep in mind that Gnome 3 just hasn't been around for very long. Right now Gnome 3 is most likely only being used by technical people, Linux enthusiasts, etc. - it has not trickled down to end users yet. We may have found the top, obvious problems in Gnome 3, but not the long tail of bugs. Which is why I suggested to wait until 3.2. I think the survey would be much more useful with free-form answers, instead of fixed options. That way you may be able to eliminate one level of indirection (oh, most people said 'somewhat', now let's make another survey to find out why). While fixed options let you do amazing web hackery, free-form answers lead to more insightful results. From what I can see, you were dealing with a small numbers of responders, so free-form is excellent, but when you are talking about thousands of them, I don't think you can do very much. It might be a good idea to add a bit more of them, but I think the bulk should be fixed. * Being able to publish the raw results really helps; this way other people can help you extract statistics. Do ask permission from the respondents to post their replies so that other people can study them. I agree. * That survey probably gave too much importance to the system administrators themselves - not surprisingly, better admin tools was the most requested thing. However, the survey *did* get us good insight into end-user's problems. Makes sense. It may be very valuable to ask the heads of deployments what they think of Gnome 3 so far, even if they haven't evaluated it yet on their users - these people have a very good sense of what will work well for people in the real world. By the way, the main page for the deployments is this (I don't know how up-to-date it is): https://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/GnomeDeployments About two years after that survey got published, some people had the idea of making it periodic - unfortunately I lost track of them and of that effort. You may want to look around for them; they'll have interesting thoughts, I'm sure. While that might be interesting, I am more interested on getting as many unfiltered results as possible. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 5:58 PM, Maciej Marcin Piechotka uzytkown...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, 2011-08-19 at 16:08 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: Likewise, 'happy' will be thought of differently by different people (a very odd word to include in a questionnaire, if you don't mind me saying): I think everyone understands the word happy. /ME wipes a mouthful of coffee from my monitor Then you haven't read enough of the survey research literature. That doesn't change the fact that everyone understands the word happy. Not necessary. Just to give an example - there is strong cultural influence how do you respond to simple question 'How are you'. In some cultures it is impolite to answer better then 'so so' and the normal answer is somehow along lines 'it could be worst, it could be better'. On the other hand the correct response in English is usually 'great' or 'fine' (to quote my teacher 'even if your house is burnt and your dog is terminally ill'). I have been warned to avoid 'standard' 'so so' response as I will be perceived as either impolite or after some large disaster because what I really meant was 'great'. (Somehow less directly related but also illustrates the problem of tricky words - in my native language friend means what in English is understood by close friend and many people whom I would call in English friend I would call in Polish acquaintance. Even though I know the difference I am less inclined to call people friends as in my mental model they are described by word 'acquaintance'). Of course this is 'just' cultural bias caused by people not being native speakers of English. You need to add individual bias. In each case it adds more and more 'noise' to survey. Yes, words can mean different things depending on the cultural background, but that's not the case for happy. In my experience all cultures know exactly what you mean when you say you are happy with something. If you have evidence to the contrary for this precise word, please say so, otherwise it's just a faulty generalization. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 6:24 AM, Benjamin Otte o...@gnome.org wrote: Felipe Contreras felipe.contreras at gmail.com writes: That doesn't change the fact that everyone understands the word happy. http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html Yes, I have seen that video before. However, not once in that video is he suggesting that people are confused about what happy means. When somebody says he is happy with his vacation, he knows exactly what he means, and so do we. What Kahneman is saying is that we are talking to remembering self, that's all. You can't ask the experiencing self anything, only the remembering self can answer something in a survey. Now, here's the funny part, this is similar to the reason why you need a survey; you need some data, some numbers. Because when you ask the question Is GNOME improving? or Do people like GNOME 3?, all you have are recollections of experiences which can be completely distorted from the reality, only with data you can have some degree of certainty. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Where is the data?
On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Allan Day allanp...@gmail.com wrote: I never found the time to do a proper write up of the user testing I did on the shell. It was brief and ad hoc; I can tell you that the five participants in my study were all able to complete the tasks that were set for them though, which included basic things like launching applications, switching windows, changing the desktop background, responding to notifications and changing the volume via the system settings area. They obviously found some things trickier than others, but they could do everything I asked them to do. So, no data there. [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-August/msg00123.html There's no data there. [2] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/ No data there either. [3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-February/msg00192.html I have read that whole thread; there's no data there either, just about of explanations that can be reduced to; it's sleek. [4] http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/where-did-the-buttons-go/ No data here either. [5] http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2010/12/10/ubuntu-brainstorm-top-10-for-december-2010/ Here's some data, but I don't see any connection to GNOME 3 design. [6] https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointOne/Features/FixAnnoyingThings No data here either. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Where is the data?
On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 6:02 PM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Sat, 2011-08-20 at 14:43 +0200, Tomasz Torcz wrote: I think his objections were justified. There is really no raw data at those URLs. Except Allan never claimed he was providing raw data. In fact, he explicitly said that he does not do write-ups of user tests. So what's the point of replying to a mail asking specifically for data? I also do user tests when working on the help. I also don't do write-ups. I fix problems or I pass information on to those who are in a position to fix the problems. Just because I don't publish reports doesn't mean I don't do user tests. And the constant assertions that nobody is looking at feedback are getting a bit insulting. User tests, like surveys, are not perfect and can be both misleading, and not significant enough. If those tests are to be taken seriously, they should be published so that they can be scrutinized, otherwise they are not evidence of anything, not to the rest of the world. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 3:34 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 2:09 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Nothing is ever perfect, but having at least some results is better than nothing. Since you have repeated this assertion a few times, I must ask: What if the results are all wrong and we don't have any way of knowing that? Would those results still be better than nothing in your opinion? What do you mean by all wrong? Let's assume that the results show that 1000 people are not happy with GNOME. How can that be wrong? Maybe they all lied? Maybe people who are satisfied do not want to or have time to take part in surveys and you only get people who are not happy into the survey? In which case, the results may show results that are not correct. i-e a significantly large number of participant say that they are very unhappy with GNOME but what if that number is nothing compared to the number of people who are very much satisfied with GNOME? I didn't say this so far because it might sound like I am trying to make a joke but since you still insist on your assertions about the survey, I feel I must say this: How do you know people in general like to participate in surveys? It is my observation that most people do not like to do that, unless they have something to complain about. Now this observation of mine could very well be wrong but how do we know that? Do we do a survey to find out if people like to participate in surveys? Are you serious? That totally and completely speculative and unrealistic. Have you ever participated in making a survey? I have, as I have explained, for the Git survey. In my experience, only the people that want to help in some way do spend the amount of time required to fill the survey. But again, as I said, if there's no survey on Earth you could trust, just ignore the results. Results by themselves cannot hurt you. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Allan Day allanp...@gmail.com wrote: Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Nothing is ever perfect, but having at least some results is better than nothing. Since you have repeated this assertion a few times, I must ask: What if the results are all wrong and we don't have any way of knowing that? Would those results still be better than nothing in your opinion? What do you mean by all wrong? Let's assume that the results show that 1000 people are not happy with GNOME. How can that be wrong? 1000 people responded that, the results were not somehow altered, or boycotted, the results are the results, and that's that. ... 'Wrong' in social research typically means that your results lack validity: that you think the data is measuring one thing (eg. 'GNOME users' happiness with GNOME 3') but is in fact measuring something else. When you do survey research, you have to be certain that one person understands the questions in the same way that another person does. Looking at your questionnaire, that won't be the case. An example: === 02. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? === (single choice) * unhappy * not so happy * happy * very happy * completely ecstatic Different people will understand the words GNOME/happy/very happy/ecstatic in different ways. Some might think 'GNOME' is their distro (including the lower levels of the stack), Which is why we ask more question to understand their level of geekness. That should help the make correlations; the people that use a terminal all the time more likely know that GNOME is just the DE. The people that don't have much experience might be confusing GNOME with the distribution. Likewise, 'happy' will be thought of differently by different people (a very odd word to include in a questionnaire, if you don't mind me saying): I think everyone understands the word happy. That is what is used in Git user survey, and seems to be doing the job just fine. In any case, if you have suggestions that don't have these problems, feel free to share them. You've also got the representativeness problem. Your sample will inevitably be unrepresentative, probably highly so. Even if 100% of your *unrepresentative sample* tick the unhappy box, that doesn't tell you much about your target population: you might just have sampled every 'unhappy' GNOME user that's out there. If you can identify the bias, that's not a huge problem. tl;dr version: your survey results will be misleading. No, the results would not be misleading; the *analysis* of the results might. But different people can analyze them in different ways. The important thing is to get *some* results. We already have a wealth of data about peoples' experiences with GNOME 3 and are working to address the issues that are being raised. It's great that you want to help, but this survey really won't be useful. Where? I haven't seen any. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Patryk Zawadzki pat...@pld-linux.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:17 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Are you serious? That totally and completely speculative and unrealistic. Have you ever participated in making a survey? I have, as I have explained, for the Git survey. In my experience, only the people that want to help in some way do spend the amount of time required to fill the survey. Could you at least make the answer options less emotional? Like exchange happy for satisfied etc. I don't remember answering ecstatic in the Git survey but that could be my bad memory. That's a reasonable alternative. How about pleased? Any other people have an opinion? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 2:40 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: I didn't say this so far because it might sound like I am trying to make a joke but since you still insist on your assertions about the survey, I feel I must say this: How do you know people in general like to participate in surveys? It is my observation that most people do not like to do that, unless they have something to complain about. Now this observation of mine could very well be wrong but how do we know that? Do we do a survey to find out if people like to participate in surveys? Are you serious? That totally and completely speculative and unrealistic. What is speculative? I made it very clear that it is *my* observation and *if* it is correct, the results of this survey may very well be wrong. Do you have any evidence that suggests that my observations above are incorrect? Do you even know what speculation means? to make an inference based on inconclusive evidence; to surmise or conjecture [1] You don't have any evidence how often does this happens in real surveys, if at all. It's all based on conjecture. Have you ever participated in making a survey? No I have not but that does not necessarily mean what I said is incorrect and could just be ignored by pointing to examples of other surveys. If other people are ignoring an important issue, doesn't mean we should do the same. You are again going off-tracks. Let's go back to the point. You said: What if the results are all wrong and we don't have any way of knowing that? Would those results still be better than nothing in your opinion? You can ignore the results. Problem solved, is it not? I have, as I have explained, for the Git survey. In my experience, only the people that want to help in some way do spend the amount of time required to fill the survey. As I have explained to you many times before, git's user-base is mostly (if not all) geeks and those geeks know where the mailing-list is and be able to access the survey easily. Still, I am a geek and a very happy user of git but I didn't even know about the existence of this survey until you told me. Even then, I didn't care to participate. I am pretty sure I would have cared to participate if I had something to complain about its current or planned features. GNOME's user-base consists of people who do not even know what GNOME is so many of them will not be able to participate, especially if they are happy users. In short, example of git surveys are quite irrelevant here. So what if that's true? (I don't think so) At least I have a data-point of experience with surveys, you can discard it all you want, but what makes your speculation based on imaginary notions somehow more valid that my experience in real-world scenarios? At best you can say that they are both equally useless (I don't think so). The world is no filled with Zeeshans. Most people fill surveys truthfully. If you think otherwise, you can ignore the results. But again, as I said, if there's no survey on Earth you could trust, just ignore the results. Results by themselves cannot hurt you. In this case those results will really hurt since then you will have some numbers to back-up your claim of GNOME 3 is completely unusable. *If* your motivation for this survey has remained the same, you'll spread a lot of negative propaganda (which you already did even when you didn't have any numbers) and many people will just say Oh, people don't like this gnome 3 thingie, must be shit and will stay away from it. Even if you don't do that, there is many others who will use this data in that way. Aha, so that's what you are afraid. This survey will happen with or without GNOME's blessing. It would be in GNOME's best interest to improve the survey to get more useful results, and so far, I think many people have done so. However, at this point it's clear that you are not interested in improving the survey, all you are doing is making imaginary claims that lead to a dead-end; all surveys are pointless, because the answers might be lies. There's no way to go forward from there. If you have some *suggestions* how to improve the survey to avoid whatever issues you see, then say so, otherwise I'll not explain any more why this is flawed thinking that leads nowhere. Cheers. [1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/speculate -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 3:17 PM, Allan Day allanp...@gmail.com wrote: Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Allan Day allanp...@gmail.com wrote: Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: ... Different people will understand the words GNOME/happy/very happy/ecstatic in different ways. Some might think 'GNOME' is their distro (including the lower levels of the stack), Which is why we ask more question to understand their level of geekness. That should help the make correlations; the people that use a terminal all the time more likely know that GNOME is just the DE. The people that don't have much experience might be confusing GNOME with the distribution. 'Geekness' is not the only thing that will affect people's understandings, and you haven't adequately measured that anyway. Plus that doesn't do anything to deal with the problem of what people understand by 'GNOME'. It's easy to throw empty criticism. Provide *suggestions*. Likewise, 'happy' will be thought of differently by different people (a very odd word to include in a questionnaire, if you don't mind me saying): I think everyone understands the word happy. /ME wipes a mouthful of coffee from my monitor Then you haven't read enough of the survey research literature. That doesn't change the fact that everyone understands the word happy. ... In any case, if you have suggestions that don't have these problems, feel free to share them. My suggestion would be to give up entirely or to rethink the premise of your research. The latter is what I'd have advised when I was working as a research consultant, or what I would have told one of my students when I used to teach this stuff, for that matter. That's not helpful. If you are such a master, surely you can come up with a totally brand new user survey that is order of magnitude better. That would be greatly appreciated. You've also got the representativeness problem. Your sample will inevitably be unrepresentative, probably highly so. Even if 100% of your *unrepresentative sample* tick the unhappy box, that doesn't tell you much about your target population: you might just have sampled every 'unhappy' GNOME user that's out there. If you can identify the bias, that's not a huge problem. So tell me - how will you accurately compensate for the effects of self-selection bias? What kinds of claims will you make about representativeness? What would *you* do? tl;dr version: your survey results will be misleading. No, the results would not be misleading; the *analysis* of the results might. But different people can analyze them in different ways. The important thing is to get *some* results. It seems bizarre to suggest that research data is valid irrespective of how it is gathered. If your questionnaire does not provide valid measurements no amount of analysis can compensate. You can thrown an analysis saying all this data is crap if that makes you happier, but this survey won't eat babies. We already have a wealth of data about peoples' experiences with GNOME 3 and are working to address the issues that are being raised. It's great that you want to help, but this survey really won't be useful. Where? I haven't seen any. We've had incredible amounts of feedback; most (if not all) of which has been read, and which does get taken seriously. I also know that those of us who are influencing the design of GNOME 3 take a strong interest in peoples' experiences with it and ask them questions (that's certainly what I do). There's also a small series of user tests last I did Christmas, the results of which have been fed into the development process. Believe me, that is more than enough to be going on for now. (Some more user testing would be useful at some point in the future, though.) For a professor you should know better. I want the data. Anyway, I am going to ignore your comments, unless you provide some *suggestions* for improvement. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:08 PM, Andy Wingo wi...@pobox.com wrote: On Fri 19 Aug 2011 13:33, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com writes: That's a reasonable alternative. How about pleased? Any other people have an opinion? You present yourself as reasonable by adjusting on the small points, but you ignore the feedback of greater importance. My opinion is that you are not the right person to lead an effort to gather feedback on GNOME. Is there anyone in the universe able to create a user survey worthy of GNOME? Can you convince him of doing so? In the meantime, this is the best that we have. I will continue listening for constructive feedback, but comments such as this is not good, you are doing it wrong, it's impossible, lead to nowhere. Besides, as Alan Cox said, it doesn't have to be perfect, like software, we can learn from the mistakes of the 2011 survey, and make a better one for 2012. Can we not? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 5:02 PM, Frederic Muller fr...@gnome.org wrote: On 08/19/2011 09:13 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:08 PM, Andy Wingo wi...@pobox.com wrote: On Fri 19 Aug 2011 13:33, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com writes: That's a reasonable alternative. How about pleased? Any other people have an opinion? You present yourself as reasonable by adjusting on the small points, but you ignore the feedback of greater importance. My opinion is that you are not the right person to lead an effort to gather feedback on GNOME. Is there anyone in the universe able to create a user survey worthy of GNOME? Can you convince him of doing so? In the meantime, this is the best that we have. I will continue listening for constructive feedback, but comments such as this is not good, you are doing it wrong, it's impossible, lead to nowhere. Besides, as Alan Cox said, it doesn't have to be perfect, like software, we can learn from the mistakes of the 2011 survey, and make a better one for 2012. Can we not? I actually thought that Andy's feedback was constructive. Really? Then you can take that feedback and translate it into concrete actions, right? To me, that sounds as useful as the advice of some academic that says that no software should ever be deployed without strong static analysis. He might be right, but if he is not offering himself to do the job he is proposing, what's the point? IOW; Talk is cheap, show me the code. Your approach, motives and way to handle this discussion are questionable. You have obviously failed to convince the GNOME community and GNOME developers that your survey would be useful, and I'm afraid nobody feels like taking leadership on the project neither. Yeah, I failed at an impossible task, maybe. A lot of people have already told you that enough feedback has been gathered at this time. I doubt you will get much endorsement or help around here anymore (I could of course be wrong on that last point). To tell you the truth I have been involved in trying to run a survey for GNOME 2 years ago IIRC (and I think it's a recurrent project - you can find some old pages on our wiki) with a group of other people, and we reached the same conclusion: a survey will not help GNOME to get better. I obviously had very different motives (and GNOME 3 was not around). I strongly disagree. You can't know that until you actually *try*. Why are you so afraid to try? So if you want to help GNOME maybe you should discuss further with the design team and see how to contribute in a positive manner. All I am trying to do is get some user feedback. Without such feedback I doubt any kind of discussion on the design would be fruitful, because it all be dismissed based on assumptions and wishful thinking. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Josselin Mouette j...@debian.org wrote: Le vendredi 19 août 2011 à 16:08 +0300, Felipe Contreras a écrit : It's easy to throw empty criticism. Provide *suggestions*. Well, here’s a suggestion: since nobody knows how to address the correct target population or how to interpret the results, I suggest to spend our time fixing bugs instead. Yes, because we are absolutely and positively certain that fixing these bugs is exactly what GNOME users want. There is no possibility that they want something else, or that the prioritization is not ideal. By definition, whatever GNOME does, is what the users want, and to suggest otherwise is heresy. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Sam Thursfield sss...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:08 PM, Andy Wingo wi...@pobox.com wrote: On Fri 19 Aug 2011 13:33, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com writes: That's a reasonable alternative. How about pleased? Any other people have an opinion? You present yourself as reasonable by adjusting on the small points, but you ignore the feedback of greater importance. My opinion is that you are not the right person to lead an effort to gather feedback on GNOME. Is there anyone in the universe able to create a user survey worthy of GNOME? Can you convince him of doing so? Gathering feedback does not necessarily require an online user survey. Indeed, do you have a better suggestion? As stated, for a project which currently targets, among others, users who do not care what parts of their operating system can be labelled GNOME a survey is not a very reliable way of gathering feedback. Have you ever tried to explain, to a person who doesn't have an interest in software, what GNOME actually is? Again, do you have a suggestion to get feedback in a more useful way? In the meantime, this is the best that we have. I will continue listening for constructive feedback, but comments such as this is not good, you are doing it wrong, it's impossible, lead to nowhere. Besides, as Alan Cox said, it doesn't have to be perfect, like software, we can learn from the mistakes of the 2011 survey, and make a better one for 2012. Can we not? I urge you to consider the fact that if the majority of people subscribed to desktop-devel-list don't have faith in idea of an online user survey, an online user survey is probably not going to much have effect on the views of the people who contribute to the discussions on desktop-devel-list, and since most of the GNOME community read desktop-devel-list you can probably extend this to all of the other GNOME mailing lists and IRC channels as well. So the status quo, where there are absolutely no numbers whatsoever is preferred. Any attempt to gather quantifiable feedback is discouraged. IOW; the GNOME community does not care about what users have to say at all. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Richard Hughes hughsi...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 August 2011 14:13, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Is there anyone in the universe able to create a user survey worthy of GNOME? Can you convince him of doing so? Do your survey with the questions you want, and come to your own conclusions. Blog about them if you want. You could even convince a distribution to include a popup with a link, although I think that's insane. Just don't tell people that it's from the GNOME project, in any way authorized or blessed by the ruling cabal[1] or developers. I'm pretty sure the majority of the people actually working on GNOME 3.2 don't want a survey at all. Sorry to be blunt. No, thanks for the direct feedback. So basically you are saying there's no way any survey of any quality would be blessed by the GNOME community. That certainly clarifies things. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 7:24 PM, Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote: On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:37:33PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: Doing nothing achieves nothing, doing something achieves learning. You may well not learn what you intended but you will learn something including quite possibly how to do future surveys better. Any survey that isn't a carefully controlled randomly selected sample of users doesn't result in learning. Unless the biases are identified, which we are trying to do. Moreover, I have tried to push the idea to have an automatic notification, which would maximize the number of responders, and thus increase the randomization. But apparent this idea is not welcome. So, ideas to improve the randomization are dismissed, and then you say without randomization, the survey is not useful. IOW; you are intentionally deadlocking the proposal. It results in data that forms some sort of rorschach blot. It might if you look at it as a whole, but you can try to dissect it. Everyone will see what they want to see. Those who believe that Gnome 3 is a step back will point out that the majority of responses are negative. Those who believe it's a step forward will point out that happy users are going to be far less inclined to respond. There's no way whatsoever to determine how representative the responses are, and so there's no way whatsoever to learn anything about the population. All we'd learn is that some users like Gnome 3 and some users don't, and that's something we *already know*. So we'd gain nothing, but we'd guarantee another huge set of arguments which would themselves also tell us nothing. That's an assumption. What if we get 10 million responses? Would you still claim that the results are not representative? I think only *after* getting the results you would be able to say anything about it's representativeness. Something more realistic, say you get at least 300 responses that don't have any geek bias, that would be more than enough to make some statistically significant conclusions. I'm not saying its necessarily a great approach but it's vastly superior to people sitting around picking holes in the idea until it never happens. I disagree. Doing something that sucks more time and energy away from development without actually telling us anything in return is worse than that not happening. Felipe is obviously free to do whatever he wants, but there's no benefit in Gnome itself participating in any way. If we want to find out what our users think then the only way to do that is to have professional involvement and a random sample set. This is not sucking any time and energy from anybody, I just need access to the server that has limesurvey installed, or somebody else can do that (can't take that much time), I would contact all the relevant news sites and make the relevant posts in social media. All that that is needed from GNOME people is a blessing. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 8:25 PM, Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Sam Thursfield sss...@gmail.com wrote: Gathering feedback does not necessarily require an online user survey. Indeed, do you have a better suggestion? There are several other ways to get feedback. For example, user testing. I'm sure all the major distributions have done some user testing. Most large companies have a whole user testing team/group. And where are the results? Without evidence it's only wishful thinking. I'm not a user testing expert but it involves giving people (both new and experienced) tasks to do, watching how they do it (without interfering) and then asking them about their experience. I know people who have successfully used http://www.usertesting.com/ for web sites. I don't know if a similar, inexpensive option exists for desktop software or not. Right, so nobody is going to do this. Is there any better suggestion that would actually be implemented? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 8:15 PM, Jonathon Jongsma jonat...@quotidian.org wrote: On Fri, 2011-08-19 at 19:42 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Richard Hughes hughsi...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 August 2011 14:13, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Is there anyone in the universe able to create a user survey worthy of GNOME? Can you convince him of doing so? Do your survey with the questions you want, and come to your own conclusions. Blog about them if you want. You could even convince a distribution to include a popup with a link, although I think that's insane. Just don't tell people that it's from the GNOME project, in any way authorized or blessed by the ruling cabal[1] or developers. I'm pretty sure the majority of the people actually working on GNOME 3.2 don't want a survey at all. Sorry to be blunt. No, thanks for the direct feedback. So basically you are saying there's no way any survey of any quality would be blessed by the GNOME community. That certainly clarifies things. It seems obvious from most responses here that there are not very many people within the GNOME community that think that this sort of a survey would be beneficial, and worry that it may even be counter-productive. In response to this realization, you have apparently shifted into outrage mode. You pretend that it is impossible to simultaneously care about what users while also opposing a user survey that has no hope of being a representative sample of users. You might say you do, and you might even believe so, but if your actions demonstrate otherwise, perhaps you do not. If the GNOME community really cared about what users have to say, and this survey indeed does not have any hope of having a representative sample of users (I disagree), then wouldn't they take the reins and do it properly? It is possible for well-meaning people to come to different conclusions on the best methods for achieving a certain goal. Yes, whenever I have a disagreement on a method to develop some software, I just go ahead and do it that way, and then say; see? this is how it should be done. Saying you are wrong is easy, anybody can do that. It seems that most people here don't agree with your methods. Please accept the fact that this does not mean that they hate users, despite your attempts to conflate the two things. I would, if they went ahead with the right methods and got some user feedback, if not in the form of a survey, in any method. You are free to proceed with your survey on your own. Others are free to not wish to join you. It's that simple. Can you please stop the faux outrage? Sure, I just wanted to make things clear. In fact, if they cared about user feedback, there would be some numbers available somewhere, and I wouldn't have to do this. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 08:03:45PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: I can only think of one reason why somebody would provide criticism without suggestions for improvement... 1. Because they cannot think of a good suggestion. Then surely I cannot be blamed for not coming with one either. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 8:50 PM, Richard Hughes hughsi...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 August 2011 18:42, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Sure, I just wanted to make things clear. In fact, if they cared about user feedback, there would be some numbers available somewhere, and I wouldn't have to do this. We're not asking you to do anything. I am not suggesting you are. Please just run the poll on your personal blog and stop getting aggressive with developers on this mailing list. I am not being aggressive. All I am asking is for clarification; is there *anything* I could do to make the survey more acceptable to you guys, or are you opposed to the very idea of having a user survey blessed by GNOME? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 9:20 PM, Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 08:14:25PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 7:24 PM, Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote: Any survey that isn't a carefully controlled randomly selected sample of users doesn't result in learning. Unless the biases are identified, which we are trying to do. You can only identify the biases if you already know the population, and you can only know the population if you've got a random sample set to begin with. That's not true. You might need that if you want to account for *all* the biases, which nobody can do anyway. What most people do is try to figure them out, chances are you might be missing some of the biases, but hopefully the unidentified misrepresented group won't be that big anyway, and thus wouldn't affect so much the analysis. If it turns out that a significant bias is not identified beforehand, that can be tackled in the next survey in 2012. Moreover, I have tried to push the idea to have an automatic notification, which would maximize the number of responders, and thus increase the randomization. But apparent this idea is not welcome. It doesn't help. The people most likely to respond to an irritating popup that disrupts their work are people who already feel that gnome 3 is an irritating piece of software that disrupts their work. You can't get a random sample in-band. It doesn't help? It does randomize the sample more, doesn't it? Maybe it's not perfectly randomized, but nothing can ever be perfect. So, ideas to improve the randomization are dismissed, and then you say without randomization, the survey is not useful. IOW; you are intentionally deadlocking the proposal. I am saying that your results aren't useful unless your sample is random. I don't know of a good way to obtain a representative sample. There's no such thing as 0% random, or 100% random, all we can thrive for is to increase the randomness. And I already explained that non-random samples are already useful if you can identify the biases. Everyone will see what they want to see. Those who believe that Gnome 3 is a step back will point out that the majority of responses are negative. Those who believe it's a step forward will point out that happy users are going to be far less inclined to respond. There's no way whatsoever to determine how representative the responses are, and so there's no way whatsoever to learn anything about the population. All we'd learn is that some users like Gnome 3 and some users don't, and that's something we *already know*. So we'd gain nothing, but we'd guarantee another huge set of arguments which would themselves also tell us nothing. That's an assumption. What if we get 10 million responses? Would you still claim that the results are not representative? Yes, because you have no idea how big the population is. Maybe 10 million is the total population and it's representative. Maybe it's 50% of the population, disproportionately biased towards those of a given prior opinion. You can't know. Do you have any idea what is the likelihood of that happening? Try throwing a dice 10 times and always getting 1-3. Even if the dice is rigged, it's very unlikely. It gets exponentially less likely 1 million times. I think only *after* getting the results you would be able to say anything about it's representativeness. Something more realistic, say you get at least 300 responses that don't have any geek bias, that would be more than enough to make some statistically significant conclusions. It really wouldn't. Yes it would. Check Cochran's formulas. 300 unbiased responses gives you already good statistical power, after a certain point it doesn't matter much what is the total population; 10m, 30m, 1m. The likelihood that would would get 300 unbiased responses all pointing to the wrong direction is almost nothing, in fact a few dozens would do (if they are truly random). There are some simple calculators online: http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm But yeah, since there's going to be bias, you need more. I disagree. Doing something that sucks more time and energy away from development without actually telling us anything in return is worse than that not happening. Felipe is obviously free to do whatever he wants, but there's no benefit in Gnome itself participating in any way. If we want to find out what our users think then the only way to do that is to have professional involvement and a random sample set. This is not sucking any time and energy from anybody, I just need access to the server that has limesurvey installed, or somebody else can do that (can't take that much time), I would contact all the relevant news sites and make the relevant posts in social media. All that that is needed from GNOME people is a blessing. The sucking of time and energy would come from the argument over
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 9:28 PM, Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote: (Resend: Managed to leave d-d-l off Cc: by accident) On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 06:15:03PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: Any survey that isn't a carefully controlled randomly selected sample of users doesn't result in learning. It results in data that forms some You need truely or reasonably random samples for certain kinds of activities and analysis in particularly quantitative analysis when you want to perform p tests and the like. You don't need it in order to learn merely to generate statistical proofs and those are often quite useless anyway. Proviing gnome 3 is great/indifferent/sucks doesn't have much value. You do not need it for explorative learning. Small children do not need to open a statistically valid sample of randomly chosen doors to learn about doors ! I am all for making it easier for people to give feedback about Gnome, but presenting it as a survey gives a strong implication that the results are meaningful as an aggregate rather than as a collection of anecdotes. If we want to hear form users, let's make it easy for users to talk to us. A survey isn't the way to achieve that. Again, any better suggestions? I tried many of them back in 2007, and got nowhere, I think a user survey is the best one we've got. sort of rorschach blot. Everyone will see what they want to see. Those who believe that Gnome 3 is a step back will point out that the majority of responses are negative. Those who believe it's a step forward will point out that happy users are going to be far less inclined to respond. You seem to be assuming the results and that the only question of interest is does gnome 3 suck. I'm assuming that the sort of people who are going to go to the effort of filling out a survey are likely to be closer to the population discussing things on lwn than the population of usres in general. That may be entirely untrue! But if we get the opposite results then it still doesn't tell us anything that's actually true, and it's still an opportunity to argue the issue rather than focus on making software better. We most likely are going to be able to identify that bias. Let's make some wild guesses; 50% of the people that use GNOME 3 like it, and 50% don't. Of that amount, 90% seem to be geeks. In the remaining 10%, the people that use GNOME 2 show 80% happiness, and of GNOME 3 it's only 60%. But you still don't think there's any value in there, fair enough. Then we dig through that 40% subset that didn't like GNOME 3 and take a look at their comments, and we find Very strange, Can't get used to it, and things like that. At that point we might want to see if they left an email to contact them, and then try to gather more detailed feedback. I think there's a chance that this survey could tell us something that's actually true. If we want to find out what our users think then the only way to do that is to have professional involvement and a random sample set. Of course, and the only way to produce a kernel or desktop is to hire professionals to do it for you no doubt. If you went back to 1991 and wanted a production-quality kernel within a year, Linux probably wouldn't be your starting point. There'd be a learning process involved with setting up a professional-quality survey team, and the first few attempts would be pretty buggy. We'd get there in time, but until then... Until then it's better to have nothing? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:47 PM, Richard Hughes hughsi...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 August 2011 20:26, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: ...To me GNOME is hitting everything in the room as it's going forward, and saying; I'm fine, I know where I'm going... To me, the sun is shining through the windows of a freshly redecorated room. Either you are hallucinating, or you are not getting the analogy. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 9:34 PM, Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: I am not being aggressive. All I am asking is for clarification; is there *anything* I could do to make the survey more acceptable to you guys, or are you opposed to the very idea of having a user survey blessed by GNOME? Your answers sound aggressive to me but I think that's totally understandable given all the negative feedback. Perhaps you are not used to straight-forward communication. I'm not trying to aggravate anyone. I gave my feedback. I'd want the survey to be much more detailed. What do you think about this menu option on Cheese seems like it would give more feedback than do you like GNOME? But I do not have time to help come up with the questions, so I agree with many folks that say you'll have to take the feedback you've gotten and move forward. Trying to do that would create a huge survey that most likely most people will not even try to answer. If somebody really detests certain menu option on Cheese, I'm sure they'll let you know in the comments box. Who knows, maybe it turns out the part that most people are not satisfied with is the documentation, those kinds of results might trigger some interesting debate. Or maybe you are right, and we wouldn't not get anything useful, but at least we would have some ideas for the next survey. Giving feedback does not mean providing alternatives or working on the project. It's easy to give feedback. It's much harder and more time consuming to incorporate that feedback. You asked for feedback, you got some. If you want those people's approval, then you'll probably have to incorporate that feedback. I have incorporated all the feedback that can be incorporated. The rest is too vague, or not actionable. What do *you* think must absolutely be changed in the survey? If you aren't planning on incorporating it, then it's probably best to stop insisting that people need to provide alternatives if they give negative feedback. Huh? That's a very broad statement. Let's be clear, I have not turned away any feedback. Let's analyze for example the claims by Allan Day: --- When you do survey research, you have to be certain that one person understands the questions in the same way that another person does. Generally yes. Is that achievable in all the questions in this survey? Probably not (would love to hear some suggestions otherwise). Which why some other questions are asked to determine the people that might be thinking in other terms. (I already explained that) You've also got the representativeness problem. Your sample will inevitably be unrepresentative, probably highly so. Says who? What if we get 10 million answers? That would be such a big chunk of the total population that this problem is not a big deal. Or what if there's a notification app embedded in GNOME 3.2. That would not only maximize the reponders, but also maximize the randomness. Wouldn't it? (I already explained that) your survey results will be misleading That's very useful. Now, how about some ideas to make the results less misleading? --- What exactly do you want me to do with that feedback? (aside from what I have already done) I am all ears. Obviously, you don't need everyone's approval to move forward. Rarely does any project get 100% approval. How you move forward, how much feedback you want and how you use that feedback is up to you. I want the approval of the GNOME community, and I am willing to accept all suggestions for improvement in order to get that. So, what should I do? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:26:08PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: Yes, because you have no idea how big the population is. Maybe 10 million is the total population and it's representative. Maybe it's 50% of the population, disproportionately biased towards those of a given prior opinion. You can't know. Do you have any idea what is the likelihood of that happening? Try throwing a dice 10 times and always getting 1-3. Even if the dice is rigged, it's very unlikely. It gets exponentially less likely 1 million times. That's clearly wrong. If you have a bucket of red balls and blue balls and you draw 10 million balls, and you find that you drew 6 million red balls and 4 million blue balls, what does that tell you? If you're sampling randomly it tells you that there are more red balls than blue balls. If you're subconsciously preferring to pick up red balls then it tells you nothing. So we need to avoid subconsciously picking red balls, which means we need to pick users randomly which is something we can't do with a voluntary survey. Cochran's formulas don't apply here because you're not picking your sample set at random. That's a very bad example. An example closer to reality would be that color is indeed the bias, but we are not interested in the color, but the size of the balls. After the survey, we find out that overall, red balls are bigger than blue balls. Fortunately we don't care about the proportion of blue vs red balls in the total population, we only care about blue balls, so, we only consider the size of those. In the GNOME case, the color of the balls corresponds to the bias we want to identify; like geekness, and the size is the actual thing we are interested on, which is their happiness. We only care about non geeks (blue balls), as many GNOME people have stated, the real target users are the ones that don't even know what is GNOME. Now, if what you are worried about is the self-selection bias, we can add a new question Why are you taking this survey? with the option Somebody is pushing me, and encourage people to push their relatives/colleagues/friends to fill the survey (just like a professional firm would, except crowd-sourced). Then, for external validity, you only consider the results of the people that answered Somebody is pushing me (they don't have self-selection bias). -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 11:12 PM, Jason D. Clinton m...@jasonclinton.com wrote: On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 10:23, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Here's the fourth version of the survey, only tiny minor changes, it seems it's stabilized as there isn't many more comments. Shall we start planning the deployment? Who can get it into the site? Can I have access? How about an application that pops notifications similar to this one? Would such a thing be accepted? You haven't yet addressed the problems that I pointed out. You haven't yet provided any suggestion. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 7:28 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org wrote: On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 11:12 PM, Jason D. Clinton m...@jasonclinton.com wrote: How about an application that pops notifications similar to this one? Would such a thing be accepted? You haven't yet addressed the problems that I pointed out. You haven't yet provided any suggestion. You are the one who proposed the idea of this survey and (more importantly) insist that a useful survey is possible for GNOME so *you* must address all criticism/concerns if you want us to take your proposal seriously. Ignoring input from others just because they don't have a solution for the problem(s) they point out isn't going to lead anywhere. So, your idea of input is this can be improved. What kind of input is that? If you have a concrete suggestions for improvement, I'm all ears. Or do you want me to make random modifications until Jason likes one of them? So far, *everybody* that has raised concerns has at least tried to provide some suggestions, except Jason, who apparently for some reason wants me to do his thinking for himself. I would gladly try that, if that is going to move this thing forward, but I think it would be much more productive if he did that, if at least because it would shorten the cycle between: how about this? nope, this? nah... I can only think of one reason why somebody would provide criticism without suggestions for improvement... Also, I thought this was *GNOME* user survey, not mine. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 8:33 PM, Joanmarie Diggs joan...@gnome.org wrote: While I've been watching this all go by, I've not jumped in largely due to being crazy-busy. Sorry about that! While the crazy-busy situation has not yet changed, I couldn't help but notice this: No worries, that's why the survey is not scheduled any time soon. === 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? === (image selection) - GNOME 2 - GNOME 3 - Unity - KDE I assume these images will have sufficient accessible descriptions associated with them for users who are blind. Well, I don't know such descriptions would be. We would need somebody that has actually used GNOME (and KDE) through this interface, and even then I'm not sure it's possible. In that same spirit: Shall we start planning the deployment? I have no opinion on this other than to say should deployment planning indeed begin, would you mind pinging the Accessibility team along the way? I'm sure it will all be fine and accessible, but I would hate to make that assumption only for us to find out, upon deployment, that something was missed regarding the survey instrument, the notifications, etc. How to do that? I assume cross-posting to multiple lists is discouraged. But yes, it would be great to get their feedback. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
Hi, On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 8:53 PM, Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org wrote: Thanks for trying to get feedback from users. This is something that is really hard to do. It might also be worth contacting a company that does this professionally to see if they can help us. I do not think you will be able to do very much with the answers to the questions you ask below. It's going to be a lot of work for data that is not useful. Let me try to explain. On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 9:23 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Here's the fourth version of the survey, only tiny minor changes, it seems it's stabilized as there isn't many more comments. Shall we start planning the deployment? Who can get it into the site? Can I have access? Where are we deploying it? How are we going to get people to take it? Have you read the original thread? http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.desktop/45432/focus=45456 I originally suggested questionpro.com, as it was the best option I could find. Later on Frederic Muller suggested to use limesurvey which supposedly it's installed in GNOME servers. As for getting people to take it, I was suggesting the usual info distribution channels; blogs, planets, online magazines, twitter, Google+, facebook, etc. In addition to that I suggested a new software component that would read information from the Internet, and pop up a notification to the user, the user would be able to disable these notifications easily, of course. Perhaps for GNOME 3.2. But I didn't hear a lot of encouragement for that idea. How about an application that pops notifications similar to this one? Would such a thing be accepted? Within GNOME? Would the distros agree to ship it? === 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? === (image selection) - GNOME 2 - GNOME 3 - Unity - KDE I think if we want to get average users, most of them are not going to know what GNOME is. That is the purpose of this question, they don't have to know, they just select the image that resembles what they are using. I love GNOME and I've been using GNOME for years and working with GNOME, and I still don't really know what all is GNOME on my desktop. I think the questions will have to be much more specific. How do you make this question more specific? They are images, you just have to select one. === 02. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? === (single choice) * unhappy * not so happy * happy * very happy * completely ecstatic If people tell you they are happy or unhappy with GNOME, what are you going to do with that? If they are unhappy what are you going to fix? If they are happy, what did they like? The color, the menus, the windows, the apps, ...??? Baby steps, first, let's get the results. If they are happy, great, not much to do, if they are unhappy, well, then some further actions after this survey might be needed. Having said that, we might find some clues in the rest of the survey, as this question is somewhat split into multiple groups later on, and in the worst case scenario, there's the free-form comments. === 03. Where do you run GNOME? === (multiple choice, with other) === 04. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === (multiple choice, with other) === 05. How long have you been using GNOME? (years) === (numeric) The previous 3 questions are only useful if it will somehow help you understand the other answers better. Also the previous one. Maybe people don't like GNOME 2 that much, but they do like GNOME 3... === 06. How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === (single choice) * better * no changes * worse * cannot say They aren't going to know what's GNOME versus what's the distro. And maybe they like the help better and the menus less. Or maybe it's missing their favorite feature. This is way too vague ... The purpose is to get some sense of progress. Say, the respondents using GNOME 2 are answering worse a lot, it might be worth investigating what might have been those changes. How would you make this question less vague? === 07. Does GNOME do what you want? === (single choice) * Everything * Mostly * Somewhat * Barely * Not at all If they say not at all, what are we missing? Again, then you might want to take further actions beyond this survey. Most likely though, you would be able to find some correlations between this question to other ones. Maybe it's only people with a lot of experience with computers that would answer in such way. We would know only after getting the results. === 08. How happy are you with GNOME in regards to == (matrix) Columns: unhappy / not so happy / happy / very happy / completely ecstatic + ease of use + documentation + language availability + accessibility + community This gets closer but it still way too high level. At least is something. If you have a better idea, why not share
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:21 PM, Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org wrote: On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:20 PM, Alan Cox a...@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk wrote: And then well it's up to people if they listen, what they do with the data and how they follow it up. Sure the results will need reviewing with a little car The answers are so vague that you are not going to be able to follow up on them. So they are unhappy with GNOME. Then what? This is a simple survey, not some kind of magical questionnaire. Just having the information that users are unhappy is valuable already. Plus, there's the free-form suggestion text. Plus the resulting debate may well answer even more questions than the survey ever did... If you care about debating and learning from our core group of dedicated supporters, yes. If you care about average users, well, I doubt you'll learn much from them this way. The questions and answers are just too vague and those people are likely not reading LWN so they won't be able to follow up with us that way. Well, we don't know what the average GNOME user looks like, do we? What we do know is that is the target user, and we have tried to identify them with the question in the survey. Supposing we get a few thousands of respondents, and only 10% qualify as normal users, even then, if you filter those answers, that should give you statistically significant information about the whole target user-base. Oh, and maybe a lot of people don't read LWN, but they don't have too, just like anything viral, the link to the survey would spread, and eventually at least few normal users are bound to have a geek friend that would show them the link. Of course, maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps the average user of Linux/GNOME does know what GNOME is, knows how to contact the GNOME team and can tell you what version of GNOME they are using. And if they do, what is the survey going to tell you? That they do or don't like GNOME? And how long they have been using GNOME? What are we going to do with that information? Suppose you are right, and we do get that useless (not in my books) information, what is the damage? Suppose however that we do find something useful there. I think it's totally worth trying. Before any survey, you should know how you are going to use the information so that you can be sure to ask the right questions. Not necessarily. Again, asking a useless question doesn't hurt anybody. Of course, if you have better questions, those should be prioritized over the ones that have less chance of being fruitful. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:37 AM, Alan Cox a...@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk wrote: Use it to work out what questions it would be interesting to ask next year ? Look at what shows up in terms of additional comments. Look at the discussion around it, drop in the odd 'Why ?' question of your own. Use it to kickstart a secondary debate on the gnome site. Exactly. I forgot this crucial point. This has been the case in the Git survey; after years of doing it, we have found that some questions were missing (by looking at the comments box), and that some questions were not really providing much. Nothing is ever perfect, but having at least some results is better than nothing. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Nothing is ever perfect, but having at least some results is better than nothing. Since you have repeated this assertion a few times, I must ask: What if the results are all wrong and we don't have any way of knowing that? Would those results still be better than nothing in your opinion? What do you mean by all wrong? Let's assume that the results show that 1000 people are not happy with GNOME. How can that be wrong? 1000 people responded that, the results were not somehow altered, or boycotted, the results are the results, and that's that. The *conclusions* based on the analysis of the results might be wrong, but that wouldn't be a problem of the survey, and if you are so afraid of that, you can ignore the results of the survey completely. I for one think the survey already has enough mechanisms to determine biases, and therefore come up with conclusions with a reasonable degree of certainty. But I wonder, can you come up with some example of bad results to the answers proposed here, and why exactly we wouldn't know they are bad? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
Hi, Here's the fourth version of the survey, only tiny minor changes, it seems it's stabilized as there isn't many more comments. Shall we start planning the deployment? Who can get it into the site? Can I have access? How about an application that pops notifications similar to this one? Would such a thing be accepted? Cheers. === 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? === (image selection) - GNOME 2 - GNOME 3 - Unity - KDE === 02. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? === (single choice) * unhappy * not so happy * happy * very happy * completely ecstatic === 03. Where do you run GNOME? === (multiple choice, with other) + Desktop + Laptop + Netbook + Tablet === 04. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === (multiple choice, with other) + 3.2 + 3.0 + 2.x + I don't know + I'm not using it currently + other, please specify === 05. How long have you been using GNOME? (years) === (numeric) === 06. How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === (single choice) * better * no changes * worse * cannot say === 07. Does GNOME do what you want? === (single choice) * Everything * Mostly * Somewhat * Barely * Not at all === 08. How happy are you with GNOME in regards to == (matrix) Columns: unhappy / not so happy / happy / very happy / completely ecstatic + ease of use + documentation + language availability + accessibility + community === 09. Which other desktop environments have you used in recent years? == (multiple choice, with other) + KDE + Unity + XFCE + LXDE + Enlightenment + other (please specify) === 10. How many years of experience do you have using computers? === (numeric) === 11. How often do you use terminal/console? == (single choice) * What is that? * When I have no other option * I can't live without them * Is there anything else? === 12. Have you contributed to the GNOME project? === (single choice) * Yes * No === 13. Have you contacted the GNOME team? === (single choice) * Yes, successfully * Yes, unsuccessfully * No, I don't know how * No, never had the need === 14. If you could change three things in GNOME, what would they be? === (free form) === 15. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? === (free form) -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)
On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 6:42 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Here's the fourth version of the survey, only tiny minor changes, it seems it's stabilized as there isn't many more comments. Shall we start planning the deployment? Who can get it into the site? Can I have access? How about an application that pops notifications similar to this one? Would such a thing be accepted? Cheers. === 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? === (image selection) - GNOME 2 - GNOME 3 - Unity - KDE === 02. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? === (single choice) As Bastien pointed out already, in question#1 you are reaching out to users who use GNOME without knowing so but in the rest of the questions, you are not. I think this survey isn't going to be useful to us if you don't include such users in it as GNOME 3 is very much targeted for this type of users. Before you ask, no I don't know how you can do that. Huh? What makes you think so? Let's suppose the user has absolutely no idea what is GNOME, so (s)he is not clicking on a GNOME user survey link, but gets a notification from the desktop (which I'm not sure is going to happen), or something like that. The title of the page will still be GNOME desktop user survey, so what is the user going to thing? Hmm, looks like I'm using this GNOME thing. First question, click on the image that best resembles the desktop, the image says GNOME 3, well, certainly looks like I'm using that GNOME thing. There's a tendency here. Even ignoring all that, the second question Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? is still targeted at these people, even if they don't know what GNOME is, they know the survey is about the desktop they are using, what else would it be about? The fist question makes sure they have the right thing in mind. Sure, some of the rest of the questions are not applicable, but that doesn't mean these kind of users are not targeted, at least they will be able to answer 02, 07, 10, and probably 03, and that should certainly be at least better than nothing. Maybe those question can in the beginning, and perhaps even split into two parts. There's really not much that can be done in order to target these users better. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 6:46 PM, Alan Cox a...@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk wrote: It doesn't tell you much about the environment Are you using it on Desktop Laptop Netbook Tablet Good point. Added. and perhaps a question about skill levels/years of computing experience. That might help understand which user categories want changes. Eg it's assumed that most of the 'customise it' requests are from experienced users but I don't think anyone has actualyl analysed that to find out ? That would be interesting. I'm not sure if other people would agree, but I'll add it on the next version and see. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
Hi, Here's the third version of the survey. === 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? === (image selection) * GNOME 2 * GNOME 3 * Unity * KDE === 02. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? === (single choice) * unhappy * not so happy * happy * very happy * completely ecstatic === 03. Where do you run GNOME? === (multiple choice, with other) + Desktop + Laptop + Netbook + Tablet === 04. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === (multiple choice, with other) + 3.2 + 3.0 + 2.x + I don't know + I'm not using it currently + other, please specify === 05. How long have you been using GNOME? (years) === (numeric) === 06. How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === (single choice) * better * no changes * worse * cannot say === 07. Does GNOME do what you want? === (single choice) * Everything * Mostly * Somewhat * Barely * Not at all === 08. How happy are you with GNOME in regards to == (matrix) Columns: unhappy / not so happy / happy / very happy / completely ecstatic + ease of use + documentation + language availability + accessibility + community === 09. Which other desktop environments have you used in recent years? == (multiple choice, with other) + KDE + Unity + XFCE + LXDE + Enlightenment + other (please specify) === 10. How many years of experience do you have using computers? === (numeric) === 11. How often do you use terminal/console? == * What is that? * When I have no other option * I can't live without them * Is there anything else? === 12. Have you contributed to the GNOME project? === (single choice) * Yes * No === 13. Have you contacted the GNOME team? === (single choice) * Yes, successfully * No, I don't know how * No, never had the need === 14. If you could change three things in GNOME, what would they be? === (free form) === 15. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? === (free form) -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v3)
Hmm, forgot to change the subject. On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 8:03 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Here's the third version of the survey. === 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? === (image selection) * GNOME 2 * GNOME 3 * Unity * KDE === 02. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? === (single choice) * unhappy * not so happy * happy * very happy * completely ecstatic === 03. Where do you run GNOME? === (multiple choice, with other) + Desktop + Laptop + Netbook + Tablet === 04. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === (multiple choice, with other) + 3.2 + 3.0 + 2.x + I don't know + I'm not using it currently + other, please specify === 05. How long have you been using GNOME? (years) === (numeric) === 06. How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === (single choice) * better * no changes * worse * cannot say === 07. Does GNOME do what you want? === (single choice) * Everything * Mostly * Somewhat * Barely * Not at all === 08. How happy are you with GNOME in regards to == (matrix) Columns: unhappy / not so happy / happy / very happy / completely ecstatic + ease of use + documentation + language availability + accessibility + community === 09. Which other desktop environments have you used in recent years? == (multiple choice, with other) + KDE + Unity + XFCE + LXDE + Enlightenment + other (please specify) === 10. How many years of experience do you have using computers? === (numeric) === 11. How often do you use terminal/console? == * What is that? * When I have no other option * I can't live without them * Is there anything else? === 12. Have you contributed to the GNOME project? === (single choice) * Yes * No === 13. Have you contacted the GNOME team? === (single choice) * Yes, successfully * No, I don't know how * No, never had the need === 14. If you could change three things in GNOME, what would they be? === (free form) === 15. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? === (free form) -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 8:06 PM, Jason D. Clinton m...@jasonclinton.com wrote: Questions 2, 6, 7, and 8 are still leading. See my last email for a discussion of how to fix them. Feel free to propose alternatives. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 7:08 PM, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 18:35 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: After going through all the feedback, here's the second version of the proposed survey. There is a proposal to delay the survey until 3.2 is released, to try to avoid some of the initial negative feedback of 3.0, I guess. If this is delayed for 3.2, perhaps there could be a small piece of software that pops up a notification for this, and perhaps some notifications in the future. What do you think? === 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? === (images of various desktops) * GNOME 2 * GNOME 3 * Unity * KDE snip === 03. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === (multiple choice, with other) + 3.2 + 3.0 + 2.20 - 2.32 + 2.10 - 2.19 + 2.0 - 2.9 + pre 2.0 + not using it currently + other, please specify You expect the person answering the questionnaire to not be able to recognise GNOME in question 1 (and identify it from a picture) then be able to tell you which version they're using in question 3? I think people don't have any problem finding About in any system and get the version of the software. However, if your survey software has the option of adding notes on a question, we could add a bit of instructions. At least the online survey software that I found didn't have that option. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 8:34 PM, Luc Pionchon pionchon@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 18:35, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: After going through all the feedback, here's the second version of the proposed survey. There is a proposal to delay the survey until 3.2 is released, to try to avoid some of the initial negative feedback of 3.0, I guess. If this is delayed for 3.2, perhaps there could be a small piece of software that pops up a notification for this, and perhaps some notifications in the future. What do you think? minor points below inline, Sorry if some points were already discussed in the previous long thread, just discard === 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? === (images of various desktops) * GNOME 2 * GNOME 3 * Unity * KDE === 02. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? === (single choice) * unhappy * not so happy * happy * very happy * completely ecstatic I would merge the two last ones, so positive and negative are balanced, and so there is no middle choice: * unhappy * not so happy * happy * completely happy That's fine by me, but I think it doesn't have a bigger spectrum. === 03. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === (multiple choice, with other) + 3.2 + 3.0 + 2.20 - 2.32 + 2.10 - 2.19 + 2.0 - 2.9 + pre 2.0 I would merge the above into: + 3.2 + 3.0 + 2.x Also fine by me. + not using it currently + other, please specify === 04. How long have you been using GNOME? (years) === (numeric) === 05. How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === (single choice) * better * no changes * worse * cannot say assuming some persons answering may not use GNOME 3, wouldn't the results of this question be difficult to sort out? No? I don't see how. Either they will answer cannot say, or they would answer something that should be taken with a grain of salt. Fortunately those users would be identified. === 06. Does GNOME do what you want? === (single choice) * Everything * Mostly * Somewhat * Barely * Not at all === 07. How happy are you with GNOME in regards to == (matrix) Columns: unhappy / not so happy / happy / very happy / completely ecstatic about the columns, same remark as above. + ease of use + documentation + language availability + accessibility + distraction free I don't think that's category broad enough. === 08. Which other desktop environments have you used in recent years? == (multiple choice, with other) + KDE + Unity + XFCE + LXDE + Enlightenment + other (please specify) === 09. How often do you use terminal/console? == * What is that? I would clarify into: * I don't know what it is * I never use it * When I have no other option I think it is missing this category : * regularly for specific tasks Maybe. The purpose of this question wasn't to accurately identify the way they use the terminal, but just to get a feeling if they are geeks or not. * I can't leave without them * Is there anything else? === 10. Does GNOME include code or documentation by you? === or any contribution by you? I think there's more than just code and doc in GNOME. Actually I forgot to update this one: Does GNOME include contributions by you? (single choice) * Yes * No === 11. Have you contacted the GNOME team? === * Yes, successfuly s/fuly/fully/ ? True. * No, I don't know how * No, never had the need === 12. If you could change three things in GNOME what would they be? === (free form) === 13. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? === (free form) Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 6:51 PM, jose.ali...@gmail.com jose.ali...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: After going through all the feedback, here's the second version of the proposed survey. There is a proposal to delay the survey until 3.2 is released, to try to avoid some of the initial negative feedback of 3.0, I guess. If this is delayed for 3.2, perhaps there could be a small piece of software that pops up a notification for this, and perhaps some notifications in the future. What do you think? === 06. Does GNOME do what you want? === (single choice) I would probably rephrase this to Can you accomplish all you want with GNOME? and add a text for the user to explain why? besides the single choice options. That doesn't achieve the same. Perhaps I can accomplish all I want, but perhaps only in a slow way, or something annoys me. I think Does GNOME do what you want? fits perfectly. === 09. How often do you use terminal/console? == * What is that? * When I have no other option * I can't leave without them I asume you mean I can't live without them Oops. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Frederic Muller fr...@gnome.org wrote: On 08/01/2011 12:11 AM, Felipe Contreras wrote: lately I've feeling that there's a lot of dissatisfaction with GNOME 3. I feel this is highly suggestive. Besides we knew 3.0 was a DOT ZERO release. GNOME needed the software to be out there to gather feedback and 'help the code to mature' (that's an automatic magical process ;-) ). 3.2 is coming out in September and a lot of issues are addressed there. Shouldn't it be more judicious to wait for a more polished GNOME 3.x to be in the hands of users to ask for feedback? We could wait until 3.2 to publish the survey, that doesn't mean we shouldn't start preparing it. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:49 AM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 12:16:54AM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 07:11:34PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: Many of these are borrowed from the Git user survey. The results as you can see, can be quite interesting: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSurvey2010 It would be great if some sort of notification would popup directly on user's desktops, this way it can ensured that the maximum amount of people are notified. Otherwise, I think planet GNOME, reddit, twitter, That's impossible. Everything is possible. Google+ and so on should give plenty of feedback. Maybe also contact Ars Technica, LWN, Phornix, and so on would help. Those are only technical sites. I think the results are going to be biased whatever you do. How do you suggest to reach the end users if you already dismissed a pop up directly from the desktop? If there isn't any way, at least it's better than nothing. I didn't dismiss. I said it was impossible to popup a notification. I already explained how it would be possible; you create a new package that checks for notifications on a server. And this new packages is added as a dependency on distro packages. Perfectly possible. === 03. How do you describe the amount of configurations available? === I don't see the relevance of asking this. Furthermore the question is suggestive. Seems more to prove a point than anything else. I do see the relevance, as I think it has been a big point of contention raised by many users. Something should be done with a survey. No matter the outcome of this question, you won't be able to take these results and change things. Asking if people want more configuration options goes against why options are removed. Ideally everything should happen automatically. I'm only interested in the cases where it doesn't work. I other words, you are saying that it doesn't matter if 100% of the responders of this survey say GNOME has too few options, nothing would be done? Is there *any* kind of evidence that would convince GNOME ppl that users want more options? Or is it what the wishes of users are completely irrelevant? If you don't think it's very important, it could go to the end. Besides, if the results are overwhelmingly pointing to Too few? Don't you think it would be worth investigating? If the results end up being Just enough, then no harm done. The question is suggestive so the results will be biased. It is better to ask something like does GNOME do what you want? and then have a text field where they can specify what GNOME lacks. Something like: === . In your opinion, which areas in GNOME need improvement? === (matrix) Columns: don't need / a little / some / much + applications + usability + documentation + configuration + localization (translation) === 06. What channel(s) do you use to request help about GNOME (if any)? === With what purpose is this asked? No support is given on GNOME Bugzilla. Only minimal on gnome-list. It's important to have a two-way communication with the users, don't you think? So it's important to figure out what channels they actually use. In fact, I was thinking to add another question asking if they feel there's lack of communication with the team. I don't see giving support as: * something which shouldn't be done * two-way communication * a way that contributors communicate amongst each other However, we don't really give support. It would be nice to do more, but.. it is not done that much (bit on IRC, mailing lists, some forums). Though I'll say beforehand that I see support as separate from a developer task. I still don't see any suggestions. Resolving bugs is also support. But feel free to rephrase the question to find out how users provide any kind feedback; questions, bug reports, issues, etc. I again disagree. A support issue can be caused by a bug. Such a bug can be a requirement to solve the support issue. But this doesn't mean fixing bugs is support. It definitely is. When a product ends its support, it means bugs are not going to be fixed any more. It is important to know how many people actually use bugzilla, and how many people ask questions in IRC channels, mailing lists, etc. Maybe: What channel(s) do you use to communicate with the GNOME team (if any)? Things I'd like to know: - Multiple choice options to understand the responders technical skills. So if they've submitted a patch, contributed code somewhere, paid to write software, maintain some open source code, etc. That is IMO a nicer way to understand their skills can someone to rate themselves. How about Zeeshan's suggestion of asking how often they use the terminal? - If they use KDE/XFCE/something That's confusing. You mean if they switch between GNOME
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Christophe Fergeau t...@gnome.org wrote: 2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com: I other words, you are saying that it doesn't matter if 100% of the responders of this survey say GNOME has too few options, nothing would be done? Is there *any* kind of evidence that would convince GNOME ppl that users want more options? Or is it what the wishes of users are completely irrelevant? It seems you are starting under the assumption that the results of the survey will be representative of G3 users as a whole. My assumption is that some numbers are better than no numbers. What are your plans to make sure people unhappy with GNOME are not over represented in the poll results? Publicize the survey as much as possible. Would you like to rephrase the survey to don't assume the respondent is using GNOME, and then ask this question? == Which desktop environment are you currently using? == This should spot the people that are more likely to be unhappy. Given the kind of questions, it's bound to attract answers from people who want more options, and I don't think how we can go from N% of the people who took the survey said they wanted more options to M% of *all* G3 users want more options. To me, these figures will be totally unrelated, unless I missed something in the way you want to run the poll. They are certainly not the same, but if N = 100, you can say with certain degree of certainty that M is certainly not 0. Which value of N will convince you that M is high enough, I don't know (perhaps there isn't any). But trying to get a value of N as close as M as possible is better to what is available now, which is nothing. Since your actual goal seems to use this survey results to pressure people into adding more options to GNOME (where more options probably really means the options you want to have), I'm afraid this poll will turn into I want to prove X, let's design a survey whose result will be X. That's speculation. How would you design a survey to prove !X? It will be the same. I even suspect that you'd get different results by adding something like Do you get confused by software with too many configuration options ? Yes/No before asking the question about the amount of configuration options ;) So you want to add bias? If you have been following the thread, you would see that the proposed changes are intended to decrease the bias. In short, I think making a good poll is really hard, especially if you want to use this poll to prove that some specific point is true or not. Imo, the best we can get from a poll is ok, some people think X, unfortunately we have no idea about what the people who did not answer the poll think So you prefer, the status quo, which is we have no idea about what anybody thinks. I say the reasonable thing to do is to try to improve the survey as much as possible to get as meaningful numbers as possible. After getting the numbers, _then_ you can decide what to do with them, if anything at all. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 11:00 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:49 AM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 12:16:54AM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 07:11:34PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: [...] === 03. How do you describe the amount of configurations available? === I don't see the relevance of asking this. Furthermore the question is suggestive. Seems more to prove a point than anything else. I do see the relevance, as I think it has been a big point of contention raised by many users. Something should be done with a survey. No matter the outcome of this question, you won't be able to take these results and change things. Asking if people want more configuration options goes against why options are removed. Ideally everything should happen automatically. I'm only interested in the cases where it doesn't work. I other words, you are saying that it doesn't matter if 100% of the responders of this survey say GNOME has too few options, nothing would be done? Is there *any* kind of evidence that would convince GNOME ppl that users want more options? Or is it what the wishes of users are completely irrelevant? First at all, you need to define a goal, what are you going to do with the results and what kind of actions would be needed to improve the results in a future survey. No, you don't. Having been involved in the development of the Git user survey for years, I can tell you that there's no concrete goal, it's just to collect information. Many question didn't seem like they would get interesting results, but after getting the results, it turned out that they did. But it's only _afterwards_ that you can say for sure. Sure, some of the questions look like could be removed, since they are not providing any value, but it's only _afterwards_ that we know that. That said, if you get: 40% users answered 'Too many options' 10% users answered 'just enough' 50% users answered 'few options' But what if you get: 2% users answered 'Too many options' 10% users answered 'just enough' 88% users answered 'few options' I repeat, the worst that could happen is that the results of the question don't provide any value, so you wasted one question... big deal. You remove it in the next one. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:05 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 11:00:31AM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:49 AM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 12:16:54AM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 07:11:34PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: It would be great if some sort of notification would popup directly on user's desktops, this way it can ensured that the maximum amount of people are notified. Otherwise, I think planet GNOME, reddit, twitter, That's impossible. Everything is possible. Google+ and so on should give plenty of feedback. Maybe also contact Ars Technica, LWN, Phornix, and so on would help. Those are only technical sites. I think the results are going to be biased whatever you do. How do you suggest to reach the end users if you already dismissed a pop up directly from the desktop? If there isn't any way, at least it's better than nothing. I didn't dismiss. I said it was impossible to popup a notification. I already explained how it would be possible; you create a new package that checks for notifications on a server. And this new packages is added as a dependency on distro packages. Perfectly possible. I guess you're talking about popping up a notification in future GNOME versions? I was talking about existing desktops as various things in your initial email indicated you wanted to ask existing people (the GNOME version question + 2011 in the subject). Note: I didn't see that explanation. Please just copy/paste when it is clear I am not aware. --- My idea was to have a GNOME notifications package, or something, that would connect to a site, and then fetch any relevant notifications. The notification in this case would be a link to the online user-survey, and nothing else. Of course, the user should have the option to disable such notifications (perhaps even from the notification itself), but given than they would probably happen only a few times per year, I don't think there such a big hurry to have that option (if needed at all). --- === 03. How do you describe the amount of configurations available? === I don't see the relevance of asking this. Furthermore the question is suggestive. Seems more to prove a point than anything else. I do see the relevance, as I think it has been a big point of contention raised by many users. Something should be done with a survey. No matter the outcome of this question, you won't be able to take these results and change things. Asking if people want more configuration options goes against why options are removed. Ideally everything should happen automatically. I'm only interested in the cases where it doesn't work. I other words, you are saying that it doesn't matter if 100% of the responders of this survey say GNOME has too few options, nothing would be done? Is there *any* kind of evidence that would convince GNOME ppl that users want more options? Or is it what the wishes of users are completely irrelevant? That doesn't reflect what I said. As such, the statement that nothing would be done is not accurate. What I'd rather have is something like Does GNOME do everything what you want to do? and then not at all, somewhat, mostly, everything then maybe a small textbox to indicate what it doesn't do... but that would have to be analyzed (summarized) again. Yes, but if a significant percentage of the people answer not at all, or somewhat, then the survey would be a bit wasted, since now you have to wait another year to ask in more detail. You could also go to the free text and try to make sense of it, but that would be too much work to plot in any sensible way. If you don't think it's very important, it could go to the end. Besides, if the results are overwhelmingly pointing to Too few? Don't you think it would be worth investigating? If the results end up being Just enough, then no harm done. The question is suggestive so the results will be biased. It is better to ask something like does GNOME do what you want? and then have a text field where they can specify what GNOME lacks. Something like: === . In your opinion, which areas in GNOME need improvement? === (matrix) Columns: don't need / a little / some / much + applications + usability + documentation + configuration + localization (translation) The question already suggests that GNOME needs improvement. Are you kidding me? Nothing is perfect, everything needs improvement, everyone knows that. However, people do pick the option don't care and don't need in Git's survey, if that's truly the case: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSurvey2010#20._In_your_opinion.2C_which_areas_in_Git_need_improvement.3F I rather have non-suggestive questions. The purpose of the question
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:27 PM, Christophe Fergeau t...@gnome.org wrote: 2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com: Would you like to rephrase the survey to don't assume the respondent is using GNOME, and then ask this question? == Which desktop environment are you currently using? == This should spot the people that are more likely to be unhappy. Ah? How so? Is it an initial assumption that people using G3 are more unhappy with their DE than people using something else? What?. The survey might return that 50% of people are unhappy with GNOME, but if you add that question, it might turn out that 70% of the unhappy people are not actually using GNOME. Then you can concentrate on the answers of 30%, if that makes you happier. Anyway, if you don't like my question, suggest another one. Given the kind of questions, it's bound to attract answers from people who want more options, and I don't think how we can go from N% of the people who took the survey said they wanted more options to M% of *all* G3 users want more options. To me, these figures will be totally unrelated, unless I missed something in the way you want to run the poll. They are certainly not the same, but if N = 100, you can say with certain degree of certainty that M is certainly not 0. Of course, but since we don't know how many people in total are using G3, N=100 will only tell us that there are 100 people out of an unknown number of users that want more options, and nothing more. Read your own text: N% of the people who took the survey said they wanted more options - 100% of the people who took the survey said they wanted more options In particular, if this 100 people end up as 60% of the poll respondant, we'll have absolutely no way to go from the poll results to a percentage which means anything for G3 users as a whole. Ie without a careful selection of who answers the poll, even if 60% of the poll respondant said they would like more options, we don't know if this maps to 1% of all the users, or to 90% or to something in between. And I'm ready to bet that this 60% of the people who answered the poll want more options will quickly become 60% of gnome users want more options, and developers don't listen!. That's why I'm questioning the gathering of these numbers. They are only very marginally useful, and in spite of that, they will be misused. If you think it's likely that N=100 maps to M=1 regardless of the number of responders, then I think I'll be wasting my time providing you with logical arguments. So you prefer, the status quo, which is we have no idea about what anybody thinks. Not necessarily, but if we gather these numbers, we have to agree from the start that they unfortunately won't mean a lot, You can't decide that beforehand. Suppose the number of responses is 1 million. First you get the numbers, then you try to make sense of them, and _then_ you can decide if anything needs to be done. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 1:00 PM, Alberto Ruiz ar...@gnome.org wrote: 2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Christophe Fergeau t...@gnome.org wrote: 2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com: I other words, you are saying that it doesn't matter if 100% of the responders of this survey say GNOME has too few options, nothing would be done? Is there *any* kind of evidence that would convince GNOME ppl that users want more options? Or is it what the wishes of users are completely irrelevant? It seems you are starting under the assumption that the results of the survey will be representative of G3 users as a whole. My assumption is that some numbers are better than no numbers. Actually, in statistics, some number is not better than the lack of it. [citation needed] From my understanding, no number has a statistical power of 0, any number will have statistical power greater than that. Specially if you take any actions based upon them. What actions you take depend on the statistical power, which depends on the sample size, which we don't know yet. Plus, it's not like you are letting the survey decide, but at least you let it influence your futures actions; there's a discussion, and the developers are split 50/50, but the survey shows a clear tendency towards one side. In this case, it helps to have these numbers. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 1:45 PM, Florian Müllner fmuell...@gnome.org wrote: 2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com Yes, but if a significant percentage of the people answer not at all, or somewhat, then the survey would be a bit wasted, since now you have to wait another year to ask in more detail. Of course the same argument applies if a significant percentage of people feels that GNOME has too few configuration options. Indeed, which is why I say the question is not biased. Results can go one way or the other. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Richard Hughes hughsi...@gmail.com wrote: On 1 August 2011 11:20, Christophe Fergeau t...@gnome.org wrote: Once again, I think things will go this way, we run the poll, maybe 1% of gnome users answer, N% of these respondants answer X, and then we'll get people saying N% of GNOME users want X, upstream ignore their users! To upstream maintainers, even a user survey telling us to do X, Y or Z is probably going to be ignored. Users don't know what they want[1]. True, (common) users don't know what they want, but they definitely know what they don't want. Either way, you can ignore the results if you want, but perhaps other people might find them useful. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Christophe Fergeau t...@gnome.org wrote: 2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com: From my understanding, no number has a statistical power of 0, any number will have statistical power greater than that. See, you start implying that whatever we do, the numbers will have statistical significance (aka science aka hard facts). I'm not implying that, that's a fact. Blame the rules of the universe if you don't like that. Unless we manage to poll a significant portion of our user base (whose size we don't know), the numbers we get will have no statistical meaning, apart from being random numbers. That's is not true. While we don't know the number of GNOME users, you can make educated guesses about the total number of linux desktop users: http://counter.li.org/ (30 million) Then, there are formulas to calculate the confidence based on the sample size and total population. The bigger the total population, the less confidence, however, after a certain point it doesn't matter much if the population is 10 million, or 30 million, so we can pick the safest one, which is the bigger one; 30 million. You would be surprised of the small sample size needed to generate a high level of confidence. Again, blame the universe for it's rules, not me. All this of course, depends on an unbiased sample size, which is why as Olav pointed out, we need to identify the bias. If we properly identify the geek bias, then we can make the calculations based only on non geeks. There's plenty of things that can be done to analyze the numbers. They are most certainly not totally random. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 12:21 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: But what if you get: 2% users answered 'Too many options' 10% users answered 'just enough' 88% users answered 'few options' I repeat, the worst that could happen is that the results of the question don't provide any value, so you wasted one question... big deal. You remove it in the next one. That is still not useful information. Developers aren't going to add options for the sake of adding options. Users want more options? I guess I better hunt through my program to see what I can make configurable. That's absurd. We need to know what users want to change, and (importantly) why they want to change it. Aggregate statistics on this, even if accurate and significant, are not actionable. Oh, so you agree that a lot of options are missing? Good, so what are you doing to identify those options? Do the majority of GNOME developers agree that there are too few options? The purpose of this survey is not to identify those options, you need other tools for that. Anyway, if GNOME developers agree that there are too few options, this question doesn't hurt, and if they don't, this might help to convince them. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Luca Bruno lethalma...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 09:24:35AM -0400, Shaun McCance wrote: That is still not useful information. Developers aren't going to add options for the sake of adding options. Users want more options? I guess I better hunt through my program to see what I can make configurable. That's absurd. We need to know what users want to change, and (importantly) why they want to change it. Aggregate statistics on this, even if accurate and significant, are not actionable. Agree, I don't even see the point of this question in the survey. If an user wants a particular option the right way is to file a bug/enhancement rather than requesting it through a survey. Users can't vote in bugzilla, so you have no idea if it's only 1 person, or 90% of the users the ones who want some configuration. And there's many things you can do if you realize people desperately need more options; like enabling votes in bugzilla, a poll, an ideatorrent, etc. Or do you want to go ahead, assume people need more options, build a list of possible ones, and ask in the survey which ones they prefer? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: (snipping a lot) On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 12:45:11PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:05 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 11:00:31AM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:49 AM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: That doesn't reflect what I said. As such, the statement that nothing would be done is not accurate. What I'd rather have is something like Does GNOME do everything what you want to do? and then not at all, somewhat, mostly, everything then maybe a small textbox to indicate what it doesn't do... but that would have to be analyzed (summarized) again. Yes, but if a significant percentage of the people answer not at all, or somewhat, then the survey would be a bit wasted, since now you have to wait another year to ask in more detail. You could also go to the free text and try to make sense of it, but that would be too much work to plot in any sensible way. I don't see how your suggestion is better? 'Configurability' to me is meaningless as there is not much what we could do with the outcome. It's almost as meaningless as Does GNOME do everything what you want to do?, except that you would know that it's related to the configuration, and not usability. If you don't think it's very important, it could go to the end. Besides, if the results are overwhelmingly pointing to Too few? Don't you think it would be worth investigating? If the results end up being Just enough, then no harm done. The question is suggestive so the results will be biased. It is better to ask something like does GNOME do what you want? and then have a text field where they can specify what GNOME lacks. Something like: === . In your opinion, which areas in GNOME need improvement? === (matrix) Columns: don't need / a little / some / much + applications + usability + documentation + configuration + localization (translation) The question already suggests that GNOME needs improvement. Are you kidding me? Nothing is perfect, everything needs improvement, everyone knows that. I do not agree. Some things are good enough. Maybe not from a developer standpoint and it is not that I'd not appreciate further development, but sometimes I am perfectly happy with the current development. Then what's the point of doing any more development? Let's call GNOME 3.0 the pinnacle of desktop environment software and don't release any more versions. No, nothing is perfect, everything needs improvements. I thought the question had the intend to check if people like the GNOME version that they are using? Yes, but you didn't like the original question, so I changed it to something similar to what Git does. However, people do pick the option don't care and don't need in Git's survey, if that's truly the case: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSurvey2010#20._In_your_opinion.2C_which_areas_in_Git_need_improvement.3F You're not really addressing my concern which is that the question is suggestive. Furthermore, this seems to indicate that even with such a question, some people already indicate that Git is good enough. If it is suggesting, why a lot of people answer don't care in the Git survey. Either being suggestive is a problem, or it's not. You are saying two things at the same time. I rather have non-suggestive questions. The purpose of the question is not figure out if GNOME is perfect or not. But to find out if the user could vote for what to improve in GNOME, what would that be. IMO the worst would be if most users select don't care in all of them, because then you would have no guidance at all to what should be done. Unless of course you are not looking for areas of improvement. If people are not happy with certain things, then those things need improvement. An option might be one of those things, but that is something which needs to be analyzed, not assumed. I'd be curious to know what they're happy with as well as what users are not happy with. Yes, but we haven't found a neutral language. Happy is biased towards one side, and improvement is biased towards the other. However, I'd say improvement is less biased, because it is implicit in each and every human endeavor, whereas happiness is not. Further, I was not thinking about specifically using a survey as a method to get improvement ideas. What is wrong with getting improvement ideas? The reply from Germán Póo-Caamaño also nicely explains other means to get such feedback. I don't know what you are talking about. Further, I think 'applications' is vague. I don't think many people will know which parts are GNOME and which parts are not. e.g. 'How happy are you with GNOME in regards to' (happy is not as suggestive as you might think; though another word might be better) I do think it's suggestive
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 5:02 PM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 16:33 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 12:21 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: But what if you get: 2% users answered 'Too many options' 10% users answered 'just enough' 88% users answered 'few options' I repeat, the worst that could happen is that the results of the question don't provide any value, so you wasted one question... big deal. You remove it in the next one. That is still not useful information. Developers aren't going to add options for the sake of adding options. Users want more options? I guess I better hunt through my program to see what I can make configurable. That's absurd. We need to know what users want to change, and (importantly) why they want to change it. Aggregate statistics on this, even if accurate and significant, are not actionable. Oh, so you agree that a lot of options are missing? I didn't say that. And that statement illustrates to me that you have a very strong agenda. I don't think somebody with an agenda can design an unbiased survey. If you don't agree that options are missing, then what's the point of skipping the question, and going directly to ask what they would change? (which I don't see how it can be done in this survey anyway). First I would like to try to identify the need for change, if any. *I* am not designing the survey, *we* are. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
Hi, After going through all the feedback, here's the second version of the proposed survey. There is a proposal to delay the survey until 3.2 is released, to try to avoid some of the initial negative feedback of 3.0, I guess. If this is delayed for 3.2, perhaps there could be a small piece of software that pops up a notification for this, and perhaps some notifications in the future. What do you think? === 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? === (images of various desktops) * GNOME 2 * GNOME 3 * Unity * KDE === 02. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? === (single choice) * unhappy * not so happy * happy * very happy * completely ecstatic === 03. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === (multiple choice, with other) + 3.2 + 3.0 + 2.20 - 2.32 + 2.10 - 2.19 + 2.0 - 2.9 + pre 2.0 + not using it currently + other, please specify === 04. How long have you been using GNOME? (years) === (numeric) === 05. How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === (single choice) * better * no changes * worse * cannot say === 06. Does GNOME do what you want? === (single choice) * Everything * Mostly * Somewhat * Barely * Not at all === 07. How happy are you with GNOME in regards to == (matrix) Columns: unhappy / not so happy / happy / very happy / completely ecstatic + ease of use + documentation + language availability + accessibility === 08. Which other desktop environments have you used in recent years? == (multiple choice, with other) + KDE + Unity + XFCE + LXDE + Enlightenment + other (please specify) === 09. How often do you use terminal/console? == * What is that? * When I have no other option * I can't leave without them * Is there anything else? === 10. Does GNOME include code or documentation by you? === (single choice) * Yes * No === 11. Have you contacted the GNOME team? === * Yes, successfuly * No, I don't know how * No, never had the need === 12. If you could change three things in GNOME what would they be? === (free form) === 13. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? === (free form) -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
GNOME user survey 2011
Hi, Last time I suggested something like this the response was not so great, but lately I've feeling that there's a lot of dissatisfaction with GNOME 3. Why not find for good what people are thinking with an user-survey? I looked around for different online survey sites and unfortunately many have many limitations, but questionpro.com seems to have support for free surveys with unlimited amount of responses, which is presumably what we would want to get the maximum amount of feedback. Many of these are borrowed from the Git user survey. The results as you can see, can be quite interesting: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSurvey2010 It would be great if some sort of notification would popup directly on user's desktops, this way it can ensured that the maximum amount of people are notified. Otherwise, I think planet GNOME, reddit, twitter, Google+ and so on should give plenty of feedback. Maybe also contact Ars Technica, LWN, Phornix, and so on would help. Here's my current proposal, I tried to make it as small as possible while keeping important information, it should take a bit more than a minute to complete. What do you think? === 01. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? === (single choice) * unhappy * not so happy * happy * very happy * completely ecstatic === 02. How long have you been using GNOME? === (numeric) === 03. How do you describe the amount of configurations available? === (single choice) * More than I need * Just enough * Too few === 04. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === (multiple choice, with other) + 3.0 + 2.20 - 3.0 + 2.10 - 2.20 + 2.0 - 2.10 + pre 2.0 + other, please specify === 05. How do you compare the current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === (single choice) * better * no changes * worse * cannot say === 06. What channel(s) do you use to request help about GNOME (if any)? === (multiple choice, with other) + GNOME bugzilla + GNOME mailing list + IRC (#gnome) + asking colleague/friend + instant messaging (IM) like XMPP/Jabber + StackOverflow or other StackExchange site + N/A (haven't requested help) + other (please specify) === 07. Does GNOME include code or documentation by you? === (single choice) * Yes * No === 08. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? === (free form) -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 7:49 PM, Maciej Piechotka uzytkown...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 2011-07-31 at 19:40 +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote: On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 7:11 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: It would be great if some sort of notification would popup directly on user's desktops, this way it can ensured that the maximum amount of people are notified. Assuming user is given the choice at first login if he/she wants to participate, it is indeed a good idea. Would you be providing patches for this? I don't think first login fits well in questions. If the questions are bout Gnome experience then user should have any before answering the questions. My idea was to have a GNOME notifications package, or something, that would connect to a site, and then fetch any relevant notifications. The notification in this case would be a link to the online user-survey, and nothing else. Of course, the user should have the option to disable such notifications (perhaps even from the notification itself), but given than they would probably happen only a few times per year, I don't think there such a big hurry to have that option (if needed at all). -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 7:40 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org wrote: On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 7:11 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Last time I suggested something like this the response was not so great, but lately I've feeling that there's a lot of dissatisfaction with GNOME 3. Why not find for good what people are thinking with an user-survey? Was it really necessary to start your mail with negativity? Was it really necessary for you to point that out? It would be great if some sort of notification would popup directly on user's desktops, this way it can ensured that the maximum amount of people are notified. Assuming user is given the choice at first login if he/she wants to participate, it is indeed a good idea. Would you be providing patches for this? Maybe. If people agree to apply them. Otherwise, I think planet GNOME, reddit, twitter, Google+ and so on should give plenty of feedback. Maybe also contact Ars Technica, LWN, Phornix, and so on would help. Those sites will surely get us plenty of geeks but as I said to you in person when I asked you to make this survey happen, there must be at least 10% participation from people who can't be put in the 'geek' category: ordinary people in non-technical professions. One way to check that would be to ask a few simple questions like: * How often do you use terminal/console? * What is that? * When I have no other option * I always have some open * Is there anything else? I think that should be enough to distinguish geeks from normal users. Also, most people are still on facebook so better advertise this on facebook gnome3 page too. Yes. Other than that, the questionare you came-up looks good. :) Thanks. Kudos go to the Git project, which has refined some of these questions over the years. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME user survey 2011
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 07:11:34PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: Many of these are borrowed from the Git user survey. The results as you can see, can be quite interesting: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSurvey2010 It would be great if some sort of notification would popup directly on user's desktops, this way it can ensured that the maximum amount of people are notified. Otherwise, I think planet GNOME, reddit, twitter, That's impossible. Everything is possible. Google+ and so on should give plenty of feedback. Maybe also contact Ars Technica, LWN, Phornix, and so on would help. Those are only technical sites. I think the results are going to be biased whatever you do. How do you suggest to reach the end users if you already dismissed a pop up directly from the desktop? If there isn't any way, at least it's better than nothing. === 03. How do you describe the amount of configurations available? === I don't see the relevance of asking this. Furthermore the question is suggestive. Seems more to prove a point than anything else. I do see the relevance, as I think it has been a big point of contention raised by many users. If you don't think it's very important, it could go to the end. Besides, if the results are overwhelmingly pointing to Too few? Don't you think it would be worth investigating? If the results end up being Just enough, then no harm done. === 04. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? === This should be asked earlier. Where? === 05. How do you compare the current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === This is vague. Current as in GNOME 3.2 / 3.0, or current as in the version that they are using. Furthermore, you don't know if they upgrade each year. Obviously it's the one they are using, otherwise how would they compare? Would this help? How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago? === 06. What channel(s) do you use to request help about GNOME (if any)? === With what purpose is this asked? No support is given on GNOME Bugzilla. Only minimal on gnome-list. It's important to have a two-way communication with the users, don't you think? So it's important to figure out what channels they actually use. In fact, I was thinking to add another question asking if they feel there's lack of communication with the team. Resolving bugs is also support. But feel free to rephrase the question to find out how users provide any kind feedback; questions, bug reports, issues, etc. === 08. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? === How will you handle all the various comments you'll get? Git received 9000 answers.. who is going to read them all and summarize? I would, if nobody takes the task. Most likely I will miss a lot of important stuff if I'm the only one. But it is important to ask this, as the survey is bound to be imperfect, and this is the only place where people can actually suggest what to add to the next survey (indirectly). Things I'd like to know: - Multiple choice options to understand the responders technical skills. So if they've submitted a patch, contributed code somewhere, paid to write software, maintain some open source code, etc. That is IMO a nicer way to understand their skills can someone to rate themselves. How about Zeeshan's suggestion of asking how often they use the terminal? - If they use KDE/XFCE/something That's confusing. You mean if they switch between GNOME and those? Or that they used to use GNOME, and now they use that one? How about: Which other desktop environments have you used? - other things to later on be able to determine if the survey is biased in some way. Don't have concrete ideas atm. Well, how are you going to determine if the survey is biased in some way, or it's the actual GNOME users that are biased in some way? Either way, I think the only important bias is geekness. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Relying on glib to publish gettext linker flags
it and if there is a consensus on how other packages should handle it. Did you ever manage to solve this issue? I quite often cross-compile GLib to ARM, and sometimes windows, and the gettext dependency has always been annoying, so I wrote a patch to disable it completely, although I haven't managed to finish it through. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: External dependency proposal: Vala
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 12:11 -0400, Jamie McCracken wrote: I would rephrase this as valac as a build dependency for gnome as valac is like yacc/bison/flex in that there is no runtime dependency and only people developing or compiling from git will need it (tarballs and distributed source will contain the generated c files so wont be needed there) If people can't hack from tarballs, then it's useless. I already complained to Zeeshan about that, though I'm not sure whether it's because of the code in Rygel's makefiles, or automake's vala support. Most people use tarballs to just compile and install, and git to hack. So no, unhackable tarballs are not useless. Distributors will want to be able to apply patches to tarballs, and have the changes automatically rebuilt (even if that means having the vala pre-processor installed in the buildroots). So? The package would include valac as a build dependency, and the distributed .c files will be replaced. I don't see what's the problem. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Platform
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 12:52 AM, Ross Burton r...@burtonini.com wrote: On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 22:39 +0300, Stefan Kost wrote: Now that apple has closed the whole bonjour stack, I would prefer to build on upnp. We have gupnp, which is actively developed and fitting nicely here. I'm very curious as to what this closing of the bonjour stack is: even if they closed their Bonjour implementation the specifications are public (interestingly the Internet Draft expired yesterday): http://files.dns-sd.org/draft-cheshire-dnsext-nbp.txt Whilst I'm a maintainer of GUPnP and think it's the best solution we have for interoperating with other UPnP devices (of which they are many in the wild), I really do think it's an ugly specification which hasn't had any recent development. I also notice that Windows Vista includes something I've forgotten the name of which they basically call the successor to UPnP... The two technologies are pretty different. mDNS gives you name resolution and by extension (via cunning use of DNS) service lookups, i.e. what printers are here. At this point it stops caring and you use application-specific protocols: XMPP for link-local chat, IPP/HTTP for printing, and so on. Generally mDNS is used to announce an existing service, such as the location of an existing IPP print queue, or SSH server, or HTTP server. Because mDNS doesn't care what you do after discovery, security is not it's problem. UPnP doesn't do name resolution, but does do service discovery. Introspection of services and invocation of remote method calls is also part of UPnP, invocation is done via everyone's favorite RPC protocol, SOAP. The UPnP specifications cover a large number of services (internet gateway devices, media servers, scanners, printers, security cameras, lighting and so on) but I've only ever seen IGDs and media servers in the wild. Security is non-existent, any process (including Flash in a web page) can make UPnP calls and (say) open ports on your router. Personally speaking, if you want to do basic service announcement/discovery and you already have a good protocol which works (say HTTP or XMPP) then I'd recommend starting with mDNS. If you want to interoperate with existing devices (such as routers and media servers) then using UPnP is the only solution, because I don't know of a mDNS equivalent for the IGD magic and Apple are working very hard at stopping you from using DAAP/DPAP on a Mac. This mail turned out to be a bit longer and rambling than I was hoping, but the executive summary is this: at present, both are required, depending on the situation. Why are we discussing UPnP vs mDNS? Isn't it like discussing USB vs Firewire? Ideally both should be supported. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: On autogenerated ChangeLog
On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Gustavo Noronha g...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 12:17 -0400, Dan Winship wrote: But that's just a gut feeling and maybe it's wrong. The point is, ChangeLogs were invented back when RCS-files-on-an-NFS-server was the pinnacle of version control technology, and maybe what was most useful then isn't what's most useful now. Coming in a bit too late, I'd point out that having the ChangeLog files is good for when all you have is a tarball - think being offline. I otherwise agree with you completely. That's why it should be generated automatically when creating tarballs. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 6:16 AM, Elijah Newren new...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 6:44 AM, Elijah Newren new...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On the other hand 'gnome-2-0' is not pointing to any release, there where commits after the last release. So my question here is: who would care about those commits? They were done 6 years ago and nobody made a tag that contains them. The arguments I've heard apply to the stable releases (GEDIT_2_0_5), if somebody wants to create a GNOME 2.0 build, or make GEDIT_2_0_6 release, they'll probably go for the latest code that was actually released and used. I disagree; I think they'd check out the branch and use it; particularly since that has been the practice for a number of years now. But that's only one side of the issue, and the less interesting one at that... *sigh* Do this command: $git checkout GEDIT_2_0_5 Then do 'git branch'. What do you see? (no branch) Of course, completely unintuitive, how contributors are expected to create a 2.0.6 release under such hard conditions! Well, now do this command: $git checkout origin/gnome-2-0 What does 'git branch' show this time? (no branch) Ah, much better! Now contributors will be on their element. Creating a local branch is a step that you need to do on both cases, there's no difference whatsoever. That's kind of orthogonal to the point I was making and responding to. I was responding to your two comments, who would care about those commits and if somebody wants to create a GNOME 2.0 build, or make GEDIT_2_0_6 release, they'll probably go for the latest code that was actually released and used. Using the GEDIT_2_0_5 tag vs. the origin/gnome-2-0 branch give you different answers, since the branch may have advanced past the tag; so there's a decision to be made. You have consistently claimed that those commits on the branch were useless and no one would even look at them, and I was pointing out historical precedent that was in conflict with this assumption of yours. Ok I thought when you said that has been the practice for a number of years now you were trying to argue against checking out tags on the basis of unfamiliarity. If you agree that checking out a tag or a branch is exactly the same on terms of difficulty then we are on the same page. Such branches were distributions just push the stuff sounds a lot like the 'pu' branch in git. The fact that they are proposed updates doesn't mean they'll get in. Someone would need to make a review of the patches before making the release and drop the ones not acceptable. I don't see how GNOME people can be comfortable making a release out of patches nobody has reviewed, but that's for another thread. I express concern because when you use git properly branches are a central part of development (unlike other SCMs) therefore you *see* these branches all the time, which is annoying. I agree. I understand the need for such branches like 'gnome-2-20'. It's unlikely, but some one might make a release out of that. But 'gnome-2-0'? Maybe I missed your switch, but I thought you had been advocating 'master' and 'devel' and getting rid of 'gnome-2-x' branches until today. So I was responding to that. I'm still advocating 'master' and 'stable', but also gnome-2.x.y (on *all* the projects). If the branch is active I say it should stay, if it's not, I say it should go. To be more clear, I think bot the gedit and gnome repos should have gnome-2.26 branches, but not gedit-1.4 or gtk-2.16. I agree it'd be nice to move known-to-be-unused branches to some archival or legacy area (refs/archive/*, refs/legacy/*?). You just have to be reasonably certain they are really unused (no enterprise distro could possibly be using them anymore, etc.). I'm guessing there's very few gnome-2-x branches that are ready for archiving by now. Perhaps it's true that gnome-2.x branches are still not ready to be archived, but there are many other branches. Do you seriously think because git.git is maintained by Junio nobody else has a clone of that repo? Of course not! Every git developer had a clone, and they all saw the maint branches. Some might have have work on top of those branches. Why didn't the world fell to pieces when Junio removed those branches? git is *distributed* if you have local main-1.6.0 branch with 4 commits and Junio removes the branch what happens? Nothing, you only see that origin/main-1.6.0 was removed, big deal. Your local main-1.6.0 remains intact. I must have done a really poor job communicating; sorry about that. You had been advocating only having 'master' and 'stable' branches. I was pointing out that even git.git went further than that and had the equivalent of stable-x.y branches, and that I thought we would need those too
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 1:27 PM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: Le mercredi 06 mai 2009, à 02:21 +0300, Felipe Contreras a écrit : Debian patches are debian patches, they control them, and they make debian releases. If GNOME decides to remove those commits the distributions will not loose their patches. I think this summarize well the whole thing: we do not want to remove commits. I have already explained how you can remove commits from the visible repositories while keeping them safe in legacy repositories. If somebody really needs those commits that are not part of any release (which I seriously doubt) they will still be available. Marc-André gave me another idea. You are not limited to tags and branches, you can have any ref you want. For example refs/legacy/gedit-0-6, it's not a branch, it's not a tag, but it will make the commits not disappear and will unclutter cgit and other visualization tools. If you really want to be safe you can create legacy (hidden) repos in the case someone might need those commits. They will not waste any space because git uses hard links when you clone locally. Then you can delete all the legacy branches in the public (visible) repos while still be confident no commit will be lost. If gazillions of branches/tags/whatever is an issue with git, then I'd say this is a git bug... I can see it being an issue when doing git checkout tab and I'd very much prefer to have git let me filter the branches/tags/whatever that are of interest to me via an option. Git is perfectly able to handle gazillions of branches, it's sane human beings the ones that don't. Filtering branches and tags is a good idea, but sweeping dirt under the carpet doesn't make it disappear. And you *do have* garbage. Are you going to argue that this branch is desirable to keep alive for all eternity? http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gedit/log/?h=CORBA_ENABLED I doesn't even need to disappear, it can be hidden. What's wrong with that? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Ross Burton r...@burtonini.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 12:27 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote: Le mercredi 06 mai 2009, à 02:21 +0300, Felipe Contreras a écrit : Debian patches are debian patches, they control them, and they make debian releases. If GNOME decides to remove those commits the distributions will not loose their patches. I think this summarize well the whole thing: we do not want to remove commits. Agreed. All the way through this thread I've been wondering what possible reason there would be for throwing away a commit on a historical branch. It's not about throwing away commits, it's about throwing away unused branches. I've already explained two ways in which the branches can be thrown away without loosing the commits although personally I would just throw the commits away. My feeling is that if GNOME were using git at the time of those legacy commits where made, the people developing them would have kept the changes locally, and by this time, the commits would have been thrown away anyway. In practice there's no difference between throwing away local commits and throwing away public commits that nobody will use. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Ross Burton r...@burtonini.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 23:15 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: Are you going to argue that this branch is desirable to keep alive for all eternity? http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gedit/log/?h=CORBA_ENABLED I think most reasonable people will say that there is a difference between branches which were used for development forks and have been merged (such as this, feature branches in git), and maintenance branches such as gnome-2-26. Feature branches which have been merged can and probably should be killed from the repository unless there is a reason to keep them, but long term maintenance branches should be preserved. Ok, I agree that gnome-major-minor branches have some merit (the older the less merit) but I cannot really see any merit on branches such as CORBA_ENABLED, so at least we have some kind of agreement there. But note that CORBA_ENABLED wasn't completely merged, if you drop the branch you'll loose 2 commits. =O -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 11:34 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 23:26 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Ross Burton r...@burtonini.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 12:27 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote: Le mercredi 06 mai 2009, à 02:21 +0300, Felipe Contreras a écrit : Debian patches are debian patches, they control them, and they make debian releases. If GNOME decides to remove those commits the distributions will not loose their patches. I think this summarize well the whole thing: we do not want to remove commits. Agreed. All the way through this thread I've been wondering what possible reason there would be for throwing away a commit on a historical branch. It's not about throwing away commits, it's about throwing away unused branches. I've already explained two ways in which the branches can be thrown away without loosing the commits although personally I would just throw the commits away. My feeling is that if GNOME were using git at the time of those legacy commits where made, the people developing them would have kept the changes locally, and by this time, the commits would have been thrown away anyway. In practice there's no difference between throwing away local commits and throwing away public commits that nobody will use. They are used by software archeologist's, for mining purposes. It is part of the project's history, and you should never regret of your history. Am I denying my inheritance when I do undo? When I do 'git commit --amend', or 'git rebase'? Nah. Did the linux project made a fatal mistake when they decided to drop *all* history (from bitkeeper) and start from scratch (in git)? Nah. You can find all the history of the linux project divided into 3 repos, even from the very first release, for archaeologists or whatever reason. Would you fight to keep alive the branch Linus just found too crappy and just killed it? If a commit never made it to a release and probably never would, is it really that important? I guess this is like the abortion debate. When is a commit really alive? Does commits feel pain when they are killed before being pushed? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 6:44 AM, Elijah Newren new...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: On the other hand 'gnome-2-0' is not pointing to any release, there where commits after the last release. So my question here is: who would care about those commits? They were done 6 years ago and nobody made a tag that contains them. The arguments I've heard apply to the stable releases (GEDIT_2_0_5), if somebody wants to create a GNOME 2.0 build, or make GEDIT_2_0_6 release, they'll probably go for the latest code that was actually released and used. I disagree; I think they'd check out the branch and use it; particularly since that has been the practice for a number of years now. But that's only one side of the issue, and the less interesting one at that... *sigh* Do this command: $git checkout GEDIT_2_0_5 Then do 'git branch'. What do you see? (no branch) Of course, completely unintuitive, how contributors are expected to create a 2.0.6 release under such hard conditions! Well, now do this command: $git checkout origin/gnome-2-0 What does 'git branch' show this time? (no branch) Ah, much better! Now contributors will be on their element. Creating a local branch is a step that you need to do on both cases, there's no difference whatsoever. The reason these branches were created and kept was not merely because subversion and cvs suck and can't reasonably delete old branches. Due to the various enterprise distributions, developers needed to continue to apply patches and make other fixes to versions of the code that were several years old and they were duplicating each others' work. They had trouble discovering when others were doing similar backports and where their work was. So there was an effort to standardize old branch names to make it easy to know where to put their fixes, and where other developers could go to find them; these fixes were often not straightforward backports given the divergence of the development branch and these old versions. (I believe it was started by an email from Federico on desktop-devel-list, but it's been so many years that my memory may be faulty there.) Yes, people decided that it was okay for developers to commit their fixes without maintainer approval to otherwise unsupported branches for this particular use. Think what you will of that solution, but if you delete these old branches you will make finding and/or recording such fixes harder. Those 6 patches that are not part of any tag are evidence that the old system was being used. (I don't know if this is the optimal solution to the problem, particularly given the better VCS available to us today, but it was certainly low cost and made people happy. I believe this email thread is the first time in years anyone has expressed any issues with that decision.) I express concern because when you use git properly branches are a central part of development (unlike other SCMs) therefore you *see* these branches all the time, which is annoying. I understand the need for such branches like 'gnome-2-20'. It's unlikely, but some one might make a release out of that. But 'gnome-2-0'? Even in git.git there were maint-1.5.1, maint-1.5.4, maint-1.6.0, and maint-1.6.1 branches, in addition to the standard pu, next, master, and maint (check the log; you'll see the evidence these were there). Since only Junio can push to git.git, he can create or delete branches as he wants without affecting others; so he can (and did) delete these branches once he knew they were no longer active. But we have multiple people accessing git.gnome.org, and others may be using these old branches for years after most consider them to no longer be 'active'. Since they were particularly there for people who were _not_ the maintainer, the maintainer can't really know when they aren't being used anymore. (Maybe we could try to find out when a particular version is no longer being used in *any* stable or enterprise distribution? I bet we could kill the 1.x branches, but Solaris would probably cause us to keep all the 2.x ones around.) Do you seriously think because git.git is maintained by Junio nobody else has a clone of that repo? Of course not! Every git developer had a clone, and they all saw the maint branches. Some might have have work on top of those branches. Why didn't the world fell to pieces when Junio removed those branches? git is *distributed* if you have local main-1.6.0 branch with 4 commits and Junio removes the branch what happens? Nothing, you only see that origin/main-1.6.0 was removed, big deal. Your local main-1.6.0 remains intact. Yes, I understand the desire to clean things up; it's nice to prune stuff that's not used in git, especially since it is so easy to recreate or even work without it. However, these branches really do have a reason and do have an important (though infrequent) use; so unless you
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 12:52 AM, Les Harris lhar...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: Would you fight to keep alive the branch Linus just found too crappy and just killed it? If a commit never made it to a release and probably never would, is it really that important? It seems to me whatever Linus decided to do for the kernel is completely orthogonal to what we, the gnome project, decide to do. Germán argued that the commits are kept for archaeological reasons and I just showed how the linux project managed to both keep historical commits and have a clean slate. How is that not relevant? I guess this is like the abortion debate. When is a commit really alive? Does commits feel pain when they are killed before being pushed? It's probably for the best to keep technical arguments based on technical details and not conflate the issue with highly charged and emotional topics. The consensus so far seems to be that losing commits is a non-starter. It's not clear to me what benefit dropping these ossified branches gives us. What is the problem you're trying to solve Felipe? I've already explained that having a gazillion of branches is not clear, it creates noise. Let's take a look at these from the GTK+ repo: themes: 11 years themes-2: 11 years rendering-demo: 4 years ps-mf: 10 years master-UNNAMED-BRANCH: 10 years kris-async-branch: 3 years hp-patches: 9 years havoc-patches: 9 years gtk-printing: 3 years gtk-pango: 9 years gtk-no-flicker: 9 years gtk-new-im: 9 years gtk-multihead: 7 years gtk-hp-patches: 9 years gdk-object-with-pango: 9 years gdk-object: 3 years federico-filename-entry: 3 years cancelation-changes: 3 years AUTO_DENATTIFYING: 3 years If you move them to a historic repo, what do you loose? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 9:37 AM, John Carr john.c...@unrouted.co.uk wrote:
Hi,
On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zee...@gmail.com
wrote:
Hi,
I was one of the happiest person on this planet the day we moved to
git and i can't thanks the people involved enough. Although overall i
am pretty happy with the migration, I do have one concern: The policy
of disallowing non-fastforward pushes to any branch. I understand that
this is good for master and other stable branches, but otoh I think it
breaks the usual git workflow for feature branches.
I don't think it does break the usual git workflow. See [1] and [2].
In particular:
Rebasing is clearly a useful technique, though. Linus does not tell
developers not to use it; in fact, he encourages it sometimes. The key
rule that was passed down is this: Thou Shalt Not Rebase Trees With
History Visible To Others
And git.git doesn't follow that rule. Why?
Linux is developed with the chain of trust model; there is no master
repository, every developer has his own repo and they push only to
their own repo. Instead of pushing they send either patches or pull
requests to the relevant maintainer who will review the changes and
ack or nack them. The maintainer then will send his accumulated
patches (or pull request) to the next level up, and so on until it
reaches Linus' tree which is the one most people use, but by no means
the only one.
Note that in Linus' repo there's only one branch ('master'), where the
latest stuff is being developed. If you want the stable kernel, then
you must use another repository that is not maintained by Linus.
git.git doesn't follow that model, instead there is only one master
repository with many branches and there's only one maintainer (Junio).
Everyone must send their changes as patches and only Junio can push
them. Here there are multiple branches, including a moving branch 'pu'
(proposed updates). The 'pu' branch is simply a collection of the
patches sent to the mailing list which are relatively OK but will
possibly change since they still have comments and must be re-send.
This has the advantage that you don't have to hunt down the mailing
list for all the relatively good patches, you can just pick them from
the repository, or just use the 'pu' branch.
GNOME will not follow any of these models, there will be multiple
people pushing to the same repo, so in that sense it's less
distributed. There's another project following a similar model: X.Org.
I'm not sure they even have branch guidelines, but at least they have
user repositories where I guess each developer can do whatever they
want.
So I think you should either allow moving branches such as
'za-transcoding-rework' or have personal repositories on
git.gnome.org.
Cheers.
--
Felipe Contreras
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Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: Le mardi 05 mai 2009, à 01:51 +0300, Felipe Contreras a écrit : On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:21 AM, Marc-André Lureau marcandre.lur...@gmail.com wrote: Hi On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:57 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: [...] what is the point of having 'project' in the branch name? Branches are per-repository, so you would never have a non 'gtk-' branch in the GTK+ repo. Not project but really [project]-[MAJOR]-[MINOR].. Yes, I meant why project-major-minor (gtk-2-17) when you already know 'project'. What information would be lost with a '2-17' branch name? Why should we change a policy we had for ages and which works fine? Because you just switched your SCM and it's the best time to do that? Note that for GNOME modules specifically, having gnome-2-26 is important since it makes it clear that this is a branch for GNOME 2.26. Even if gvfs is at version 1.2, for example. I'm not sure the guidelines I've read mention that usage, but in any case that's not a compelling argument; you can still have branches '1-2' and 'gnome-2-26'. In fact, AFAIK at any given time GNOME projects have at most two lines of development. When GTK+ 2.17 is released, work on 2.16 is continued, but not on 2.15, so what is the point of keeping the 'gtk-2-15' branch? (or gtk-2-14) In reality you only have a 'master' and a sometimes a 'devel' branch. You should read http://live.gnome.org/MaintainersCorner#branches Just read it. I'm not sure exactly what you wanted to highlight. Stable branches are useful! Most projects have mostly stable branches, afaik. Hmm, I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing. My understanding is that in most projects there's only one 'stable' branch, as in the most stable branch we have at the moment. Some projects have 'devel' (we are currently working on it, but it's not that sable) and some have 'next' (this is what you'll get on the next big release, it's probably stable enough). After reading that link (and some email searching), I think you do a branching process where you create a branch for the stable release and keep the development on the master branch. In that case I would suggest instead of creating a gtk-2-16 branch just use a stable branch, which will jump (or merge) from what you now call gtk-2-14 to gtk-2-16 when you do this branching process. The gtk-2-14 commits won't be lost as long as they are tagged. Some people are using the old stable branches, so we definitely want to keep them. While GNOME only officially supports only one stable branch at any time (which is what you seem to propose), enabling people to do more than that is a good thing. As I said, the commits won't be lost, people that want to work on an old version can do that: git checkout -b my-incredibly-old-branch LIBGNOME_2_0_0 Tags and branches are simply commit references (pointers); tags are for fixed targets, while branches are for moving ones. If the branch is not going to move any more there isn't much point in keeping it, specially when there's a tag pointing to the same commit. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 10:57 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 10:53:55PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote:
Le mardi 05 mai 2009, à 01:51 +0300, Felipe Contreras a écrit :
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:21 AM, Marc-André Lureau
marcandre.lur...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:57 AM, Felipe Contreras
felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote:
[...] what is the point of having 'project' in the branch
name? Branches are per-repository, so you would never have a non
'gtk-' branch in the GTK+ repo.
Not project but really [project]-[MAJOR]-[MINOR]..
Yes, I meant why project-major-minor (gtk-2-17) when you already
know 'project'. What information would be lost with a '2-17' branch
name?
Why should we change a policy we had for ages and which works fine?
Because you just switched your SCM and it's the best time to do that?
To state more clearly: What is the benefit of switching? Does it
outweigh the inconsistency of breaking current usage?
Note that for GNOME modules specifically, having gnome-2-26 is important
since it makes it clear that this is a branch for GNOME 2.26. Even if
gvfs is at version 1.2, for example.
I'm not sure the guidelines I've read mention that usage, but in any
case that's not a compelling argument; you can still have branches
'1-2' and 'gnome-2-26'.
IMO you should make a good argument to switch, not the other way around.
What I'm proposing makes things simpler. Do I need to make a good
argument of why simple things are good?
To be clear on what I'm proposing: there's no need to add 'project' to
branch names when you already know the project ('1-2' is fine). But
going into the next level, there's no need to have '1-2', '1-4' and
'1-0', 'stable' and 'master' are more than enough.
Imagine someone who has been on a GNOME hiatus or is a new comer. What
would be easier to understand? '1-2' or 'stable'?
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Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Behdad Esfahbod behdad.esfah...@gmail.com wrote: case that's not a compelling argument; you can still have branches '1-2' and 'gnome-2-26'. Quick note. If we're going to have short branch names (as I'm planning to use for pango), it should be 1.2, not 1-2. Yeap, IMHO pango-1-2 1-2 1.2 stable -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:18 PM, Behdad Esfahbod beh...@behdad.org wrote: On 05/05/2009 04:12 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Behdad Esfahbod behdad.esfah...@gmail.com wrote: case that's not a compelling argument; you can still have branches '1-2' and 'gnome-2-26'. Quick note. If we're going to have short branch names (as I'm planning to use for pango), it should be 1.2, not 1-2. Yeap, IMHO pango-1-2 1-2 1.2 stable It's nice to have stable, but we need a fixed name for those branches too. I'd love to see stable always be an alias for the latest stable branch, but that doesn't obviate the need for 1.2 or pango-1-2. Yes, if you *must* have a branch for each single stable major release you have, then it would be nice to have another branch (pointer) to the latest one. However, why do you need a 1.2 branch when you already have a PANGO_1_2_4 tag? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:17 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 11:10:42PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
IMO you should make a good argument to switch, not the other way around.
What I'm proposing makes things simpler. Do I need to make a good
argument of why simple things are good?
You gave as reason 'you just switched your SCM and it's the best time to
do that'. That is what I was referring to. Now you give another argument
to the same question.
There are many reasons, I thought it was obvious that 'stable' is
simpler than '1-2'.
To be clear on what I'm proposing: there's no need to add 'project' to
branch names when you already know the project ('1-2' is fine). But
going into the next level, there's no need to have '1-2', '1-4' and
'1-0', 'stable' and 'master' are more than enough.
Very strong -1 to 'stable'.
Can we rename branches? What breaks? Gentoo?
Gentoo is using your tarball releases. Or what do you mean?
Imagine someone who has been on a GNOME hiatus or is a new comer. What
would be easier to understand? '1-2' or 'stable'?
'stable' was already discussed. Within GNOME 2.20, 2.22, 2.24, 2.26 etc
are stable. So it isn't clear.
The latest one, of course.
You don't need branches for targets that are not going to move.
Branches are for moving targets, tags are for fixed ones.
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Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:55 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 11:52:54PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:17 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote:
On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 11:10:42PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
IMO you should make a good argument to switch, not the other way around.
What I'm proposing makes things simpler. Do I need to make a good
argument of why simple things are good?
You gave as reason 'you just switched your SCM and it's the best time to
do that'. That is what I was referring to. Now you give another argument
to the same question.
There are many reasons, I thought it was obvious that 'stable' is
simpler than '1-2'.
Not to me when there are multiple stable branches. It then just is
latest-stable.
To me one would be 'stable' the other one would be 'maint'. If you are
going to argue that there could be 3 stable branches at the same time
then I would say: 'stable' (1-4), '1-2' and '1-0' make sense, but as
soon as the branch stops being active it should be deleted.
To be clear on what I'm proposing: there's no need to add 'project' to
branch names when you already know the project ('1-2' is fine). But
going into the next level, there's no need to have '1-2', '1-4' and
'1-0', 'stable' and 'master' are more than enough.
Very strong -1 to 'stable'.
Can we rename branches? What breaks? Gentoo?
Gentoo is using your tarball releases. Or what do you mean?
They complain when stuff isn't branched/tagged properly. Forgot which.
Well, ask them. I think they would be perfectly fine with a 'stable'
branch. That way they don't need to update their ebuild each time
there's a new major GNOME release.
You didn't address the rest of my question.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean:
Can we rename branches? - Yes
What breaks? - Huh?
Gentoo? - Huh?
Imagine someone who has been on a GNOME hiatus or is a new comer. What
would be easier to understand? '1-2' or 'stable'?
'stable' was already discussed. Within GNOME 2.20, 2.22, 2.24, 2.26 etc
are stable. So it isn't clear.
The latest one, of course.
You don't need branches for targets that are not going to move.
Branches are for moving targets, tags are for fixed ones.
That is just confusing. Really, I don't see why you don't see this.
That's just how git works: branches and tags are mere pointers.
There's no difference in the object storage, the only difference is
logical, you use branches in a way, tags in another way.
You can do stuff like:
git update-ref refs/heads/foobar 68b2aee # creates foobar branch
git update-ref refs/tags/foobar 68b2aee # creates foobar tag
git update-ref refs/taggybranch/foobar 68b2aee # creates foobar weird ref
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Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Robin Sonefors ozam...@flukkost.nu wrote: On tis, 2009-05-05 at 23:10 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: Imagine someone who has been on a GNOME hiatus or is a new comer. What would be easier to understand? '1-2' or 'stable'? If I want the sources for the gedit in Gnome 2.26, cloning gedit's repository and checking out the branch 'gnome-2-26' sounds like an easy-to-remember way to do it. If I want the sources for gedit in Gnome 2.24, I can probably deduce that 'gnome-2-24' sounds like a branch to look for. Right, 'gnome-2-24' does actually point to the latest release (2.24.3) which is good and I think all the GNOME projects should have such branches (perhaps 'gnome-2.24' instead) so it's easier to manually checkout the sources you want. But that's not in the guidelines, and it seems not even GTK+ is following that. I believe right now in order to find out all the latest stable packages for a certain GNOME release you need to use something like jhbuild. Also note that in gedit's repo 'gnome-2-22' is not even pointing to a release, so it might not even work and therefore not exactly what you want. But 'gedit-2-8' on the other hand (project-major-minor), that's what I'm suggesting to replace with 'stable'. To more-or-less completely replace the contents of the branch 'stable' every six months, and keep tags to those revisions to make sure they can be retrieved and turned into their own branches if anyone wants, sounds like branch abuse to me. That's exactly what people do with linux's repos, and I wouldn't call it abuse, it's a perfectly natural git operation. Note that you still need to create a local branch anyway: git checkout -b gedit-2-8 origin/gedit-2-8 There's not much difference to: git checkout -b gedit-2-8 GEDIT_2_8_2 -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 12:46 AM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 00:33 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:55 PM, Olav Vitters o...@bkor.dhs.org wrote: [...] That's just how git works: branches and tags are mere pointers. There's no difference in the object storage, the only difference is logical, you use branches in a way, tags in another way. You can do stuff like: git update-ref refs/heads/foobar 68b2aee # creates foobar branch git update-ref refs/tags/foobar 68b2aee # creates foobar tag git update-ref refs/taggybranch/foobar 68b2aee # creates foobar weird ref Are you assuming that all changes in stable branches get merged in development branches? How should it work the following development? a--a---a---a---a (2-20) +---b---b---b---b---b (2-22) +---c---c---c---c---c---c (2-24) +---d---d---d---d---d---d---d--... (master) If delete the branch 2-22 I will loose the latest 3 commits, same for 2-20, and so on. If you care about them, you'll make a tag that points to the head (and make a release). If you have a tag, a branch, or any other reference pointing to the commits then you'll never loose them (nor their ancestors). -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 12:37 AM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Tue, 2009-05-05 at 23:47 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:18 PM, Behdad Esfahbod beh...@behdad.org wrote: On 05/05/2009 04:12 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Behdad Esfahbod behdad.esfah...@gmail.com wrote: case that's not a compelling argument; you can still have branches '1-2' and 'gnome-2-26'. Quick note. If we're going to have short branch names (as I'm planning to use for pango), it should be 1.2, not 1-2. Yeap, IMHO pango-1-2 1-2 1.2 stable It's nice to have stable, but we need a fixed name for those branches too. I'd love to see stable always be an alias for the latest stable branch, but that doesn't obviate the need for 1.2 or pango-1-2. Yes, if you *must* have a branch for each single stable major release you have, then it would be nice to have another branch (pointer) to the latest one. However, why do you need a 1.2 branch when you already have a PANGO_1_2_4 tag? Because somebody might want to commit something for Pango 1.2.5. Bear in mind that, even if developers aren't planning anything else for a stable series, translators and documentation writers might still add things. You don't need a branch to make commits, tag them and push them. $ git checkout PANGO_1_2_4 # make changes $ git commit -a $ git tag PANGO_1_2_5 $ git push origin PANGO_1_2_5 But if you feel icky about not working on a branch you can create a local branch: $ git checkout -b work-for-1.2.5 PANGO_1_2_4 # make changes $ git commit -a $ git tag PANGO_1_2_5 $ git push origin PANGO_1_2_5 $ git branch -D work-for-1.2.5 Both cases are exactly the same. You push a tag (reference) and all the objects in the hierarchy of the head of that reference that is still not on the remote repo. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 1:00 AM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: Le mercredi 06 mai 2009, à 00:48 +0300, Felipe Contreras a écrit : On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Robin Sonefors ozam...@flukkost.nu wrote: On tis, 2009-05-05 at 23:10 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: Imagine someone who has been on a GNOME hiatus or is a new comer. What would be easier to understand? '1-2' or 'stable'? If I want the sources for the gedit in Gnome 2.26, cloning gedit's repository and checking out the branch 'gnome-2-26' sounds like an easy-to-remember way to do it. If I want the sources for gedit in Gnome 2.24, I can probably deduce that 'gnome-2-24' sounds like a branch to look for. Right, 'gnome-2-24' does actually point to the latest release (2.24.3) No. It points to the latest code in the 2.24 branch. There might be code after the release. It's a branch, it's not a tag. So, maybe I don't understand what you're saying because I misunderstand git? I'm talking about that specific branch in that specific repo: gnome-2-24 - GEDIT_2_24_3 - 8372af3 On the other hand 'gnome-2-0' is not pointing to any release, there where commits after the last release. So my question here is: who would care about those commits? They were done 6 years ago and nobody made a tag that contains them. The arguments I've heard apply to the stable releases (GEDIT_2_0_5), if somebody wants to create a GNOME 2.0 build, or make GEDIT_2_0_6 release, they'll probably go for the latest code that was actually released and used. which is good and I think all the GNOME projects should have such branches (perhaps 'gnome-2.24' instead) so it's easier to manually checkout the sources you want. But that's not in the guidelines, and it seems not even GTK+ is following that. I believe right now in order to find out all the latest stable packages for a certain GNOME release you need to use something like jhbuild. Again, it's in the guidelines. Not for GTK+ since GTK+ is an independent project. But it is for GNOME modules. See http://live.gnome.org/MaintainersCorner#branches Ok, now I looked more closely and yeah, it's in that guideline, but not on this one: http://live.gnome.org/Git/Developers#head-48e4d2e1d946ed26fa5401c9b9a0c7f5152c0161 Now, let's suppose GTK+ is a truly independent project, and their independent repo (non-gnome) is in git.gtk.org. Just like you can create arbitrary branches in your local repo, you can do the same in git.gnome.org. So what I'm trying to say is: even if GTK+ is an independent project, GNOME maintainers can still add their own branches in their own repos. After all you are prefixing the branches with 'gnome-' so it should not conflict with GTK+ branches. Right? -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 1:12 AM, Frederic Peters fpet...@gnome.org wrote: Felipe Contreras wrote: You don't need a branch to make commits, tag them and push them. The current workflow is well understood, works well for translators and other contributors, and is supported by all our tools (damned lies, jhbuild, pulse...). I really don't see the point in changing it, especially when it adds some new commands contributors will have to learn. That was just an example for a very unlikely situation. Do you really think someone's ever going to make a release adding translations to 1.2.5? 1.2.4 was released 6 years ago. Now, I'm not proposing to get rid of 'gnome-major-minor', now that I realize it's a guideline I think it should be enforced for all the repos. What I'm proposing is to drop 'project-major-minor'. I think translators and other contributors would find it easier to have a 'gnome-2.26' branch on all the repos, plus a 'stable' and 'master' branch, and not a 'pango-1-20' one. After some years nobody would be working on the 'gnome-2.26', just like nobody is working on 'gnome-2-0' now, so there's no harm in dropping the branch. If somebody really wants to make a release for that, the maintainer would still be able to do it, either by creating a temporary local branch, or a temporary branch on the official repo, if he doesn't know how, he can ask. That would be an exceptional situation though. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 1:34 AM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 01:28 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote: On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 1:04 AM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: Le mercredi 06 mai 2009, à 01:01 +0300, Felipe Contreras a écrit : You don't need a branch to make commits, tag them and push them. $ git checkout PANGO_1_2_4 # make changes $ git commit -a $ git tag PANGO_1_2_5 $ git push origin PANGO_1_2_5 But if you feel icky about not working on a branch you can create a local branch: $ git checkout -b work-for-1.2.5 PANGO_1_2_4 # make changes $ git commit -a $ git tag PANGO_1_2_5 $ git push origin PANGO_1_2_5 $ git branch -D work-for-1.2.5 Both cases are exactly the same. You push a tag (reference) and all the objects in the hierarchy of the head of that reference that is still not on the remote repo. I might misunderstand things but... with those commands, aren't you releasing pango 1.2.5 after just one commit? This is not what we do. We might have a few commits, not on the same day. In this case I think we'll need a branch anyway, won't we? You can create as many commits as you want in any fashion you want. What I tried to explain is that you can push a tag without pushing a branch. It's not about pushing a tag without pushing a branch. It's about pushing a commit without pushing a branch. Which yes, is possible. But absolutely useless. When I make a release, the last thing I want to do is sift through all the commits looking for those I might want to merge into this release. You cannot push commits, you can only push refs. Anyhow, you need to push the tag any way, right? When you push the tag, all the commits will be pushed. If you also push the branch then you would simply create a reference in the remote repo pointing to a commit that it's already there. If nobody is going to use that branch, why push it? (note that this particular example is about an extremely old release) -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 1:53 AM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: Le mercredi 06 mai 2009, à 01:24 +0300, Felipe Contreras a écrit : On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 1:00 AM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: No. It points to the latest code in the 2.24 branch. There might be code after the release. It's a branch, it's not a tag. So, maybe I don't understand what you're saying because I misunderstand git? I'm talking about that specific branch in that specific repo: gnome-2-24 - GEDIT_2_24_3 - 8372af3 On the other hand 'gnome-2-0' is not pointing to any release, there where commits after the last release. So my question here is: who would care about those commits? They were done 6 years ago and nobody made a tag that contains them. The arguments I've heard apply to the stable releases (GEDIT_2_0_5), if somebody wants to create a GNOME 2.0 build, or make GEDIT_2_0_6 release, they'll probably go for the latest code that was actually released and used. Some distributions might have shipped those patches. The fact that they are in the vcs made it easy to share with other distributions who might have needed it. Even if there was no release with those changes. Debian patches are debian patches, they control them, and they make debian releases. If GNOME decides to remove those commits the distributions will not loose their patches. Or maybe the maintainer really intended to do a release and found out it wasn't really needed in the end. That's a very unlikely situation, it make no sense that everybody suffers (having gazillions of branches) just because of that. If you really want to be safe you can create legacy (hidden) repos in the case someone might need those commits. They will not waste any space because git uses hard links when you clone locally. Then you can delete all the legacy branches in the public (visible) repos while still be confident no commit will be lost. [...] Now, let's suppose GTK+ is a truly independent project, and their independent repo (non-gnome) is in git.gtk.org. Just like you can create arbitrary branches in your local repo, you can do the same in git.gnome.org. So what I'm trying to say is: even if GTK+ is an independent project, GNOME maintainers can still add their own branches in their own repos. After all you are prefixing the branches with 'gnome-' so it should not conflict with GTK+ branches. Right? I guess I'm lost here, since this seems to be another topic (or maybe you're getting back to the original topic in the thread). Sure, maintainers are free to push any branches they want. There's nothing wrong with adding gnome-major-minor branches on independent projects on the git.gnome.org repos. Maybe this would help. Let's say we have git.maemo.org where we have a GTK+ repo, we don't have any changes on top of that (hypothetical), but we want some branches to keep track of our releases, so we add a 'maemo-2.0' branch that essentially points to 'gnome-2-24'. Should GNOME care what branches are in git.maemo.org that are not in git.gnome.org? No. It's DSCM, the owner of the repo can do whatever they want, so GNOME can add any 'gnome-' branches they want to git.gnome.org because GNOME owns those repos. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:07 AM, Marc-André Lureau marcandre.lur...@gmail.com wrote: Hi On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:38 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zee...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I was one of the happiest person on this planet the day we moved to git and i can't thanks the people involved enough. Although overall i am pretty happy with the migration, I do have one concern: The policy of disallowing non-fastforward pushes to any branch. I understand that this is good for master and other stable branches, but otoh I think it breaks the usual git workflow for feature branches. I had a little chat with Owen regarding this: == IRC LOG BEGIN== zeenix owen: hi, are we sure about this 'only fastforward for all branches' policy? owen zeenix: Well, if we had a way of figuring out that some branches where feature branches not maintenance branches, then we could conceivablly allow rebasing those branches zeenix: But not sure how to do that. I suppose we could say if there are no numbers in the branch name it's a feature branch, but that would make thigns weird if you had a branch 'bonobo-removal-2' or something zeenix owen: or you could make developer put some specific prefix in the name of feature branches? owen would be a bit ugly if all our branches were named feature-* owen zeenix: feel free to mail suggestions for a policy to gnome-infrastructure zeenix ok, will do ==IRC LOG END== I am sending this mail here cause I thought it might be better to have a discussion on this and so that other developers can speak-up if they (dis)agree. Since we are supposed to have [project]-[MAJOR]-[MINOR] for stable branches (see http://live.gnome.org/Git/Developers), what about limiting policy to those + master ? (also, deleting the feature branches should be possible) Yes, a way to differentiate fixed to moving branches like that would be sensible, but what is the point of having 'project' in the branch name? Branches are per-repository, so you would never have a non 'gtk-' branch in the GTK+ repo. In fact, AFAIK at any given time GNOME projects have at most two lines of development. When GTK+ 2.17 is released, work on 2.16 is continued, but not on 2.15, so what is the point of keeping the 'gtk-2-15' branch? (or gtk-2-14) In reality you only have a 'master' and a sometimes a 'devel' branch. I would suggest a few official branch names like 'master' and 'devel', and a special two character prefix for personal branches like 'za-transcoding-rework' (Zeeshan Ali's personal branch), the rest would be up to the project to decide. Remember that in git, branches are just pointers (which usually increment automatically); it's very easy to create, rename, delete, and update the destination. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: fast-forward only policy
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:21 AM, Marc-André Lureau marcandre.lur...@gmail.com wrote: Hi On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:57 AM, Felipe Contreras felipe.contre...@gmail.com wrote: [...] what is the point of having 'project' in the branch name? Branches are per-repository, so you would never have a non 'gtk-' branch in the GTK+ repo. Not project but really [project]-[MAJOR]-[MINOR].. Yes, I meant why project-major-minor (gtk-2-17) when you already know 'project'. What information would be lost with a '2-17' branch name? In fact, AFAIK at any given time GNOME projects have at most two lines of development. When GTK+ 2.17 is released, work on 2.16 is continued, but not on 2.15, so what is the point of keeping the 'gtk-2-15' branch? (or gtk-2-14) In reality you only have a 'master' and a sometimes a 'devel' branch. You should read http://live.gnome.org/MaintainersCorner#branches Just read it. I'm not sure exactly what you wanted to highlight. Stable branches are useful! Most projects have mostly stable branches, afaik. Hmm, I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing. My understanding is that in most projects there's only one 'stable' branch, as in the most stable branch we have at the moment. Some projects have 'devel' (we are currently working on it, but it's not that sable) and some have 'next' (this is what you'll get on the next big release, it's probably stable enough). After reading that link (and some email searching), I think you do a branching process where you create a branch for the stable release and keep the development on the master branch. In that case I would suggest instead of creating a gtk-2-16 branch just use a stable branch, which will jump (or merge) from what you now call gtk-2-14 to gtk-2-16 when you do this branching process. The gtk-2-14 commits won't be lost as long as they are tagged. I would suggest a few official branch names like 'master' and 'devel', and a special two character prefix for personal branches like 'za-transcoding-rework' (Zeeshan Ali's personal branch), the rest would be up to the project to decide. A bit like what Zeeshan proposes then. Yeap, exactly, I'm just proposing a specific nomenclature. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: git commit messages
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Behdad Esfahbod beh...@behdad.org wrote: Another option I like to document if we can agree on is prefixing the short-summary with a tag, like for example: [layout] Improve X or Y Others suggested: layout: Improve X or Y I prefer the former as it's visually more pleasing to me AND visually easier to recognize the tag in git-shortlog output. In git.git they prefer layout: improve X or Y (no capital letter). -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: git commit messages
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Shaun McCance sha...@gnome.org wrote: On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 11:45 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 16:46 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote: Don't use a trailing period either. I find this really odd and rather arbitrary. I think it's something to do with you wanting to use these first lines in bullet-point lists. But there's no real grammar consensus about periods at the end of bullet-point items. I personally can't stand a sentence without a bullet point if it's more than 4 or 5 words. Can we please remove that requirement? It's not a requirement. It's a suggestion. Individual maintainers are free to have different suggestions. So the goal of the overall suggestions is to capture what most maintainers want. Exactly, it's a guideline. Personally I don't see the point of a full-stop; you already know the summary will be one line, and if for some reason is not complete you'll see ... -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: R: git migration - svn:externals
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zee...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Tim-Philipp Müller t@zen.co.uk wrote: On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 12:09 +0200, Jaap A. Haitsma wrote: I think gst-ffmpeg uses this feature. gst-ffmpeg is in git while it uses ffmpeg which is in svn. Not really - gst-ffmpeg just runs svn checkout in autogen.sh, and that's it. We use git submodules in GStreamer though (we have a 'common' submodule for all other modules), but git submodules are still fairly cumbersome to use and I wouldn't recommend them until the git people make them less painful to use, at least not for projects where the submodule reference needs to be updated frequently. This whole idea of sub-modules is just brain-dead so I wouldn't count on git developers fixing that instead of concentrating on features of real importance. If you have some code (or even data) that is needed by more than one of your modules/packages, you either put that common stuff in another module/package and make other packages depend on this or you just bite the bullet and don't mind the redundancy. In some cases you just have to wisely use the combination of both. I'm involved a bit in git development and I have to say that view is pretty much accurate. 'git submodule' is essentially a big hack and nobody from the main developers is actively working on it. Of course patches are accepted and support is improving, but I wouldn't recommend any major projects to depend on it. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Generating .gitignore files
On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Behdad Esfahbod beh...@behdad.org wrote: On 04/20/2009 02:34 AM, Steve Frécinaux wrote: Behdad Esfahbod wrote: The idea is that .gitignore files are autogenerated and are NOT stored in the repository. To use, just copy git.mk into your toplevel, add it to git, run make -f git.mk and commit all changes it makes to your tree... If the generated .gitignore is not meant to be committed into the repository, maybe the script should edit .git/info/exclude instead ? Why? Other than being harder to generate (since current scheme generates per-dir .gitignore files) and generally a bad idea to touch the .git dir, man gitignore also suggests that that's the wrong place: Patterns which are specific to a particular repository but which do not need to be shared with other related repositories (e.g., auxiliary files that live inside the repository but are specific to one user´s workflow) should go into the $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file. Yeap, per-repository (local) include files should go to $GIT_DIR/info/exclude. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: On autogenerated ChangeLog
On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Tristan Van Berkom t...@gnome.org wrote: On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zee...@gmail.com wrote: [...] Dude, we have moved to git and you are still talking of versioned ChangeLog and favoring large patches? With a tool like git, you should be at least able to generate a single reviewable patch, large or small, and thats reviewable, yes. Versioned ChangeLog is a matter of trust, Id personally rather take care of it and revision it by hand, I didnt ask other people to do so, this is what I will do though (also, merging changes in a ChangeLog cannot be difficlult, definitly not more difficult than merging sources). Sending patches along with the modified ChangeLog would be a complete nightmare. Essentially they'll never apply cleanly and you would always need to resolve the conflicts. This would also make incredibly difficult powerful tasks such as rebasing. Please generate the ChangeLog on 'make dist'. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: On autogenerated ChangeLog
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Stefan Kost enso...@hora-obscura.de wrote: Tristan Van Berkom schrieb: You always post ChangeLogs diffs with large patches, large patches generally come to the maintainer in the form of a patch, with a single changelog entry, the maintainer reviewing a branch doesnt want to see the revision history of what happened on the branch, or why you reverted that peice of code thats not actually in the patch (and never made it into the baseline/trunk). A git patch has metadata. That is if you use git format-patch then the commit messages go into the patch and if you use git apply they will be applied along with the patch. If it was generated with 'git format-patch', then yes, but AFAIK 'git apply' will not use it, you need 'git am' for that. Also, 'git am' can generate commits out of patch series 'git am *.patch'. -- Felipe Contreras ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
