Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: GLEP 42 "Critical News Reporting" Round Two

[Stuart Herbert <stuart@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 10:03 +0100, Grobian wrote:
> Ok, you want a reaction, because you are Feeling Blue[1], right.

The only reaction I want is for us to meet the goals that I have set
out, instead of trying to move those goals.

> You describe here (and in your diary) the aim to reach 100% of our user
> base.  Wow, nice thing.  Discussions on whether you will succeed or not,
> are out of the question right now, it's just your aim.  Good.  I hope
> you will succeed!

Thanks.

> I scoured the forums a bit and looked what users were telling.  I wasn't
> surprised.  What do you expect from a user telling it all doesn't work
> any more, who doesn't run etc-update just because "after every emerge
> --upgrade --world it has over 100 files to update"?  Such user just
> ignores the importance of the tool, and will most certainly ignore
> anything else that we try to help this user.  This was just one example.

When we have emerge --news done, and users come along and complain that
they didn't know about something, then *maybe* we have some moral high
ground to stand on.

Personally, I don't care for the whole approach of moral high ground on
this one.

Gentoo's not just a cool toy.  We're also responsible to delivering the
best we can for our users.  I'd like to think that includes the best
news.

> It is a very humble attempt to try and help these users, but they simply
> chose the wrong Linux distro, because Gentoo expects you to be an system
> administrator, not a user.  At least that's my vision on it.  I think we
> can agree that Gentoo requires a user to know/realise more than a
> Fedora/SuSe/Ubuntu user.

I agree that the required knowledge level is higher than certain other
distros.  But I don't think experience or ability is the issue.  I don't
believe that experience or ability has anything to do with whether or
not that person keeps up to date with important Gentoo news.

Even if a user keeps up with the news, there will be lapses due to
sickness, holiday, pressure of other tasks, and so on.  One of the nice
benefits of emerge --news is that the news will be there for them when
they need it.

> I am just in the opinion that we lack a system where users can find the
> information they need.  

Agreed, but there's no way that every user (or even a majority of users)
will take the trouble to go looking for that information.  I'm making
that assertion partly on common-sense, and partly on my experience of
running a F/OSS project back in the mid-nineties.

I think this is where it'd help if Gentoo had some way of working out
the install base, and comparing that to some meaningful stats from
www.g.o et al, so that we could have a discussion based on facts that
could stand up to scrutiny from both sides.

However, we don't really have a way atm that I know about to get either
of these stats.  Maybe infra could do some rsyncd log analysis to put
together a rough guestimate, and maybe the GDP could post some useful
stats from www.g.o as I've twice asked for now.

There again, maybe we don't really want those stats.  Who knows - they
might show that our userbase is nowhere near the size we think it is :)

> Here comes the point where I can express my doubt about the 100%.  There
> are unfortunately users who are too hard to help, if you get what I
> mean.

I agree.  But at least we will have done our best, which I'd like to
think is what having that nice @gentoo.org email address is all about.

> As you might guess
> from my comment above, I simply think _communication_ is the big
> problem, as I see being a problem in many places around here.  

I think that covers a multitude of sins though.  I'm not trying to fix
them all.  I just want to fix this one problem at a time.

The one I'm concerned with is ensuring that the news we already generate
reaches all of our users.  That's all I care about right now.  I don't
actually care whether it's done by emerge --news; I will happily support
a more effective solution.

> Not that perfect communication solves the problem entirely, but it allows to
> reply in the sense of 'rtfw'.

rtfn, surely? :)

> If you're serious here, feel free to contact me (off-list) to see what
> we can arrange.

Drop into #gentoo-apache and let's talk :)

Best regards,
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                         stuart@gentoo.org
Gentoo Developer                                  http://www.gentoo.org/
                                              http://stu.gnqs.org/diary/

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