Ben Bucksch wrote:
>...
> 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?
Because that's what they are, users.
>...
> There is *no* Mozilla user, not even the above-average user. There are
> only sincere testers and developers.
Do you really think that? Are you in denial about all the people who can
be seen posting on Slashdot, Mozillazine, ZDNet, Userland, et al.,
talking about how they're using Mozilla as their primary browser?
> Everything else is misplaced and
> we shouldn't even start to support it.
Um, it's a bit late for that now. If we didn't want people to use
Mozilla full-time, mozilla.org would have never released any stable
milestone builds which they *can* use full-time. (Sure the milestone
releases help for development of things like MathML and Bidi, but I
hardly think that's the most important reason for their existence.)
> The only alternative I see is
> to completely change the policy of mozilla.org.
Balderdash. People other than developers and testers are going to use
mozilla.org's Mozilla builds for Web browsing, e-mail etc, regardless of
whether or not mozilla.org sanctions such use. Either mozilla.org
handles that (by having a mozilla.users group, for example), or it will
continue to suffer the problem of end users coming into the developer
groups (albeit to a lesser extent than when the groups were in the
netscape.* hierarchy, because there won't be as many Mozilla users as
Netscape users).
> > 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.
It's not random enough. For example, the bug
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55639> where the Mozilla
installer crashes on a Macintosh with not much memory available, and
spews hundreds of XUL files all over the Desktop. Why wasn't this bug
found earlier? Probably because the people who test Mozilla currently
tend to be the sort of people who have high-end computers with plenty of memory.
>...
> 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.
>...
So your real problem here is that you're annoyed that people like me
will be doing for free what people like you are intending to charge for
-- providing support for end users.
Gee, I'm really sorry.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla user interface QA
