My roadmap for a better Fedora

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Nov 22 18:28:54 UTC 2008


Ralf Corsepius wrote:

>>>>> Problem: We need more and wider testing. Why don't we get more testing?
>>>>  .. because this work is not attractive. It's boring work without
>>>>  proper credit in open source community.
>>> Right. Furthermore, testing implies finding bugs, discussing, struggling
>>> and arguing with package maintainers and upstreams. Not necessarily a
>>> way to make friends :)
>>>
>>> However, I think the primary cause in is Fedora's work-flow and Fedora's
>>> infrastructure. I find them not to be really helpful to such endeavors.
>> I do think Windows has improved a lot since they added the crash 
>> reporter.  OS X has one 
> 
> These are closed source OSes - They don't have any alternative but such
> "user participation programs" - OSS has alternatives.

Beg your pardon, but having the option (requirement?) to fix broken 
stuff myself has never been all that appealing to me as an aspect of 
open source.  I look to it more for the benefits of re-using code that 
is already well tested.  Of course that doesn't work out all that well 
in a project that keeps changing things...

>> - and I though Ubuntu included one too although 
>> I haven't seen anything trip it.
> Gnome had one for many years (bug-buddy), ... I don't recall having seen
> it providing any substantial improvement to Gnome.
> 
> Now the kernel also has one (kerneloops) ... We'll see if it will
> provide improvements.

How does that work?  I'd think a dead kernel or one that doesn't boot 
would have a hard time reporting it's problems.

> My expectations on such tools are very low. Many users switch them off
> and developers/maintainers tend to ignore them as noise.

If the developers ignore the information, then at least they should stop 
blaming the lack of testers for the lingering bugs.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com




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