On Wednesday 06 March 2002 16:04, Warly wrote: > Leon Brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> On Tuesday 05 March 2002 22:51, Borsenkow Andrej wrote: >>> It is development list. People are expected to debug there problems and >>> come here with at least suggestions what has to be done to fix them not >>> coming here ranting and wining. There are enough other places for it. Or >>> at least report problems in such way that makes it possible to track >>> them down (not that I am always doing it this way myself :-)
>> 1. a report that there *is* a problem is more useful even with no hint >> of a fix than no report; and > [...] >> So... please go easy on the newbies, please encourage reports even if >> they don't meet your high standards, please acknowledge reports that are >> useful to you, please patiently educate rather than browbeating, or at >> least hold your peace. Thanks for taking the time to reply in detail, Warly... > Cooker is our principle and precious development help, as a consequence: > - If there is too many unexperienced user, developpers will lose a lot > of time trying to know what it is really going on, and Andrej is right > to say that if the user investigate a little bit, it is great help and > will decrease the odds that the bug report is just ignored. > - If there is too many noise, developpers will stop to read cooker, or > reduce the time they spend to read it. This is unfortunately already > happening. > - We have to encourage people so that the distro will be better and > better, and trying to help and to teach users as you said Leon is > certainly a good investment for the quality and the future of the list > - We do not have to lose time with non efficient people, or people > that just complain and have no time or no willing to help or to learn. > - You are right Leon to says that it is more important to know a > showstopper than nothing, but it is unlikely than a showstopper will > only be seen by only newbies and not experienced users, and such > users have plenty of means to report problems apart from cooker, and > be filtered by the community and do not make a developper lose his > precious time 9 times over 10. > The conclusion is that we must be very demanding on cooker members, > but we must be also very tolerant with new commers that have a real > willing to help and to learn. However there are others mailing lists > for them to learn too, such as expert or like. And it is very > important that we keep a very high signal/noise ratio, or developpers > will simply stop reading cooker, and the same pb that we experienced > with bugzilla will happen. Of course not everyone could be as > efficient as Andrej and some others are, but if you do not aim at > that, I think that maybe this list is not for you. Well... it might be possible to have your cake and eat it too... or at least have some of your cake and eat some of your cake. And no, I don't propose implementing any of the following suggestion until 8.2 is out the door. So... on to the suggestion... If you want a serious developer list, you have to trim the noise. If you want willing user feedback, you have to put up with a lot of noise. This is a contradiction - with one list. You exhaust developer patience and contributor goodwill. If, however, you pick a few (maybe a dozen) `trusted lieutenants' a la Linus, and convince them to do four things, you might have heaven on a stick: 1. forward genuine bugs from cooker to the serious-developer list; and 2. either acknowledge those bugs forwarded, and forward solutions back or get serious-developers to post solutions straight back to cooker; OR make serious-developer-list posts visible to cooker; and 3. ask for more information if there is insufficient and/or gently direct the petitioner toward the FAQ; and 4. answer the obvious questions not yet in the FAQ and put the answers there (the individual FAQ answers should all be at least date-stamped). If something like this is implemented, I hope Andrej is one of the initial lieutenants; there's nothing wrong with his technical judgement. He just doesn's belong in the PR department. (-: Also, I ask that the serious-stuff-only list is called pressurecooker. (-: Points against discouraging newbies include: 1. if there is a 20:1 newbie:developer ratio, it is likely that newbies *will* trigger/uncover more bugs, necessarily including showstoppers, than developers; and 2. since newbies are an obvious target for Mandrake (SuSE is the only other large distro which really comes close to Mandrake in the field) it seems wise to fix things that disturb newbies even if they aren't `real' bugs; and 3. the badwill will flow out to ordinary customers. Mandrake doesn't need that (who does?); and 4. you will be wasting a valuable resource (remember Microsoft firing their MVP's?) in the semi-serious developers and serious but hurried contributors who do hit-and-run bug reports because they're already so busy that even reporting a bug at all is being genereous of them. Cheers; Leon
