FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Fri May 1 10:31:15 UTC 2009


David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 17:00 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>> The point isn't the amount of work going in, or anything like that; it's 
>> more the fact that the *process* to start the change was started this
>> late. That indicates a real issue with the process; we've got feature
>> pages that define what we're trying to implement, and contingency plans
>> to enact if they don't work. Why did we miss the deadline to enact this
>> here? Was the feature page not complete enough as to what was required?
>> Was the time too short between alpha/beta/preview? Were the reports just
>> late?
> 
> There were a number of individual reports of regressions, but it wasn't
> until quite late in the day that we realised just how bad the new mixer
> was, and that something really had to be done to restore the lost
> functionality.
> 
> There seemed to be a policy of closing bugs WONTFIX and telling people
> that their use case, which used to work in F-10 and now doesn't, is not
> appropriate for Fedora. That seems to include my own report of "I want
> to be able to turn my volume up past 80%", as far as I can tell.
Feel lucky, on my FC11 test system, audio stopped working.

> That approach to bugs managed to hide the problem for a little while,
> which meant that we (FESCo) didn't back out the feature in good time and
> just revert to the old mixer, as we probably should have done.
> 

Me thinks, the actual cause behind all this is a lack of a "sense of 
reality", a "reality/wishful thinking mismatch", and a lack of culture 
to learn from "errors".

It might be news to some people, but "trial and error" comprises 
"errors" and "backtracking" from errors. It doesn't comprise being 
stubborn and pressing stuff through at any price, just because "things 
must work".

IMO, pulseaudio volume control is such case: Back to the drawing board - 
It's not ready for prime time.

Other such cases in FC11, IMHO are: "no tap" and  "no zap".

Ralf




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