Who is Fedora for? [LWN.net]

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 11:50 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533)
Parent article: Who is Fedora for?

the obstacles to getting those karma votes are significant

It seems to me that this is the heart of the problem. I don't think anyone really wants to be pushing out broken untested updates if there's an alternative of getting them tested instead. At the moment it's quite a lot of manual work for a user to spot that there's something they might be interested in in updates-testing, test it, and provide feedback. If that situation was eased you could reasonably expect to get more people doing more testing, and the original problem of maintainers being forced to put out updates either untested or not at all would largely evaporate.

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Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 11:55 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Yes and one tool that came out of the thread is

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Easy_Karma

It has helped.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 12, 2010 17:31 UTC (Fri) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

No I think that misses the point that the OP was trying to make.

it's hard to visualize what spectrum of packages is available in updates-testing, particularly what packages you might be interested in testing. Although it's possible to go to Bodhi and get a list of what is available, the user has to know about that, and check it periodically to see if there are packages of interest that might be worth testing.

I wonder if yum could do it?

# yum install foo
  By the way, there is an updated version of 'foo' in updates-testing.
  Would you like to test it?

Just a thought ...

Rich.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 12, 2010 18:26 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

It's fairly easy to write a yum plugin to do that but I am not sure that is
the right UI for it. PackageKit hookups have been discussed as well.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 13, 2010 20:42 UTC (Sat) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

I think we need two parts to it; one that days "You currently have package FOO installed; would you like to try the version in updates-testing?", and a second to kick in after a few days to say "You currently have a testing version of package FOO installed; would you like to give feedback (Positive/Negative/Not yet)?"

A third part to say "You have a testing version of package FOO that has been withdrawn; would you like to roll back to the latest stable release?" would be nice too.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 17:52 UTC (Thu) by geek (guest, #45074) [Link]

I think this is pretty good comment. Offloading a lot of work from the developers to the users by making users fuss over the testing release is likely to be off-putting in practice. Engaging anyone, including testers, means making things easier for them, not harder.

I recently did some of what I thought were routine updates to my F11 box that basically broke kmail, my main app. I was able after a week to get back most basic functionality but still don't have my address book back. I would be a lot happier testing new releases if I had a nicely defined and effective undo button. It would have to work well but if present would significantly lower the cost of any regressions introduced. I don't use Fedora because I want my functionality to go away, but because there are lots of good ideas that I'll be able to put into practice sooner by using that distro.

Dave