FC5T2 - not ready for prime time.

[Peter Jones]

On Sun, 2006-01-22 at 09:13 +0800, John Summerfied wrote:
> Jesse Keating wrote:
> 
> > 
> > So while the bug(s) may seem obvious to you, unless your exact hardware
> > is sitting in my cube it isn't going to seem very obvious to me.  I am a
> > bit hurt at the implication that we don't even bother to test our
> > release before we send it out the door.  
> 
> You shouldn't be. Have you forgotten the users' perspective so soon? If 
> one puts as much effort into installing it as the OP appears to, then 
> the conclusion that there's been unsufficient testing is a reasonable 
> one for a user to make.

I've probably done (well, at least started) 300 installs so far this
month, if not more.  Like it or not, the way humans work largely
involves acclimating ourselves to patterns.  So for some bugs, which I'm
particularly *searching* for, I'm going to find them.  But the sheer
number of installs I do is going to render me blind to many things.  The
same holds true for many developers.

I could do 1000 installs in a month, and it wouldn't make things
*better*.  This is why we have test releases -- so people who don't do
10+ installs per day will see it and report what *they* see, rather than
what those of us who are unquestionably acclimated to both the code and
the behavior see.

> Hinting that BZ is a good idea is fine, but I for one find it a royal 
> pain to use, and nobody's found time to write an email (or similar) 
> interface that Mike Harris agreed was a fine idea before he joined RH.

Long ago I worked in support, when you could email in a support query
*with* authentication to prove you were a paying customer.  That's a
significantly higher of a barrier to entry than the panacea which you're
suggesting.  I really wish you could still email support questions and
hope to get a reasonably answer.  I totally disagree with the idea that
this feature is even anything remotely like a good idea in a bug
reporting system.  All that it will accomplish is more reports.  Not
more legitimate bugs actually being reported.

> More important is asking for the specifics of what went wrong, and 
> asking in _this_ forum is way more likely to get related input from 
> others than you could hope to get with bugzilla.

Have we forgotten the start of this thread?  The original post included
this text:

> Probably 8 out of 10 times the installer died while I was picking
> packages to install.  Each time it would pop up a message box saying
> something to the effect 'this is a bug' and describing how to report
> it.

Not exactly specifics, and the instructions (which clearly were
presented) have not been followed.  Nor have details emerged in response
to our queries for descriptions of the particular configuration in
question.

-- 
  Peter