Simon P. Lucy wrote:
> For those users that stray into mozilla.org user groups they need to
> be steered correctly into the right channel for their distribution.
As I said, m.users won't help us here. They will either go to
netscape.communicator or m.apps.mailnews. Why should they go to m.users?
> If a user picks up a milestone or nightly release (and by doing so
> they've qualified themselves as being different to a casual user),
> then they should get supported (and currently do), within mozilla.org.
There is *no* Mozilla user, not even the above-average user. There are
only sincere testers and developers. Everything else is misplaced and we
shouldn't even start to support it. The only alternative I see is to
completely change the policy of mozilla.org.
> Nor do I think that users should be dissuaded from getting nightlies
> and milestones because its only by having a disparate and random
> distribution that we will get the many eyes and hands that are needed
> to show bugs and uncover feature requirements.
We have 200 people regularly downloading nightlies. There are 150
netscape employees and 300 relatively constant non-Netscape
code-contributors, I guess. That's a lot of randomness. Our problem is
not too few bug reports, but too few developers to fix them.
Currently, there are not many users using Mozilla. As soon as Mozilla
gets more stable, more famous and we start supporting users (i.e. give
the impression that Mozilla is for users), there will be so many that
they are not helping with bug-reporting anymore (because they report
only very visible bugs and don't care about the rest), but consume a lot
of resources for help. I didn't see many useful bug reports from Beonex
users. But I spent a *ton* (too much) of time answering FAQs.
To stress my point again: I think, there should be an open-source
distribution of Mozilla for users. Either
- mozilla.org denies users and Beonex (and maybe others) supports them or
- mozilla.org completely changes its policy, website etc. and welcomes
users, and I pack my things with Beonex.
If mozilla.org supports users here and there a bit (i.e. as suggested),
- we will continue to see clueless posts on development newsgroups
- Beonex will have to "compete" with Mozilla, which is absolutely pointless.
Any non-strict policy causes confusion, and any confusion on the users'
side costs us a lot of time.
