Thoughts on Eric Raymond's Insights

[Jonathan Gardner]

I'm thinking of how we as a Fedora team can take the ball that ESR has 
identified -- REAL usuability -- and runn with it in a meaningful way.

Here at Fedora, we are really 2 teams. There are the "Morlocks" who are 
underground, fixing things, pulling magical levers and making things work 
-- generally subscribed to fedora-dev and fedora-test, and several other 
technical mailing lists -- and the "Eloi" who maybe make it as far as 
actually getting Fedora installed and subcribe to fedora-list.

We need to bridge the gap between the two!

Here's the proposal. We do real usuability studies. But we do it the "open 
source" way.

Everyone is a volunteer. 

We recruit the users (the "Eloi") and ask them to choose a project they are 
interested in, and we hook them up with those specialists.

We recruit some more-technically minded people (the "Morlocks") and have 
them develop some usuability plans. These people should not be testers or 
developers, but people who understand the software or have the ability to 
communicate productively with the authors of the software.

A third set of people will actually engage with the end-users in one-on-one 
sessions, following the plans that were developed. They don't have to be 
experts in that particular piece of software, they just have to be good at 
leading these sessons. The two have to communicate either by phone or by 
IRC, or some other instant communication method. 

The usuability sessions will be made public, so that other unrelated 
projects can derive some benefit from them. We'll allow others who know 
more about this kind of thing to comment on the results, summarize it for 
the developers, identify the problems and suggest solutions. Then the 
developers and testers can use this to develop the software for the end 
users.

With enough data, we should be able to identify the biggest problems and 
work to solve them before FC3. Then, when FC3 comes out, we can do this all 
over again.

The only problems I see are getting people involved and working with each 
other. I worry that while we will be able to get participants, those will 
always be the *wrong* people we are trying to target. However, never 
underestimate the amount of data that one session can produce! So maybe we 
don't need that much to actually happen.

Thought, ideas? Should we form a Fedora usuability group to tackle this?

-- 
Jonathan Gardner
jgardner(a)jonathangardner.net

[Russell Coker]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004 10:12, Jonathan Gardner <jgardner(a)jonathangardner.net&gt; 
wrote:
>  I'm thinking of how we as a Fedora team can take the ball that
> ESR has
>  identified -- REAL usuability -- and runn with it in a meaningful way.
>
>  Here at Fedora, we are really 2 teams. There are the "Morlocks" who are
>  underground, fixing things, pulling magical levers and making things work
>  -- generally subscribed to fedora-dev and fedora-test, and several other
>  technical mailing lists -- and the "Eloi" who maybe make it as far as
>  actually getting Fedora installed and subcribe to fedora-list. 
Are we supposed to eat end-users?

I hope that we have plenty of sheep, cattle and chickens using Fedora...

-- 
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[Stephen Smoogen]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Russell Coker wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Mar 2004 10:12, Jonathan Gardner
> <jgardner(a)jonathangardner.net&gt; 
> wrote:
> > I'm thinking of how we as a Fedora team can take the ball that ESR has
> > identified -- REAL usuability -- and runn with it in a meaningful way.
> >
> > Here at Fedora, we are really 2 teams. There are the "Morlocks" who are
> > underground, fixing things, pulling magical levers and making things work
> > -- generally subscribed to fedora-dev and fedora-test, and several other
> > technical mailing lists -- and the "Eloi" who maybe make it as far as
> > actually getting Fedora installed and subcribe to fedora-list.
>
> Are we supposed to eat end-users?
>
> I hope that we have plenty of sheep, cattle and chickens using Fedora... 
Just remember that human is the other, other, other white meat. And is 
good in BBQ sauce.


-- 
Stephen John Smoogen		smoogen(a)lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Lab  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 4-0645
Ta-03 SM-1498 MailStop B255 DP 10S  Los Alamos, NM 87545
-- So shines a good deed in a weary world. = Willy Wonka --

[Hugo van der Kooij]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Russell Coker wrote:

>  Are we supposed to eat end-users? 
How to serve men? (A known intergalactic bestseller)

Hugo.

-- 
 All email sent to me is bound to the rules described on my homepage.
    hvdkooij(a)vanderkooij.org		http://hvdkooij.xs4all.nl/
	    Don't meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
	    for they are subtle and quick to anger.

[tony]

cups setup in fedora sucks bigtime.

I had printer sharing working just fine in RH9 after a long uphill
battle understanding how it worked. Imagine my surprise after the
upgrade to see that my printer had disappeared from Mac OS X Print
Center.

Upgrading wiped all the cups folders especially the one containing the
windows ppd files...

So much as I hate to say it I have to go along with ESR on this one.

Tony Grant
-- 
www.tgds.net Library management software toolkit

[Tim Waugh]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 07:53:10AM +0100, Tony Grant wrote:

>  cups setup in fedora sucks bigtime.
>  
>  I had printer sharing working just fine in RH9 after a long uphill
>  battle understanding how it worked. Imagine my surprise after the
>  upgrade to see that my printer had disappeared from Mac OS X Print
>  Center.
>  
>  Upgrading wiped all the cups folders especially the one containing the
>  windows ppd files...
>  
>  So much as I hate to say it I have to go along with ESR on this one. 
You have to file bugs, or these things won't get fixed.  Can't fix
things we don't know about!

This is the first time I've ever heard of this.  Please file a bug
report, and say in it what method you used for

a) installing cups in the first place
b) setting up printers
c) upgrading

Tim.
*/

[Ian Pilcher]

Tim Waugh wrote:
>  You have to file bugs, or these things won't get fixed. 
> Can't fix
>  things we don't know about! 
Start fixing bugs that are filed, and maybe people will file some more.

-- 
========================================================================
Ian Pilcher                                        i.pilcher(a)comcast.net
========================================================================

[Geoff Teale]

On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 04:37 -0600, Ian Pilcher wrote:
>  Start fixing bugs that are filed, and maybe people will file some
> more. 
Come now, that really isn't a helpful comment.

However, sort out QA and open up things a little so that we can all get
in there and fix bugs ourselves - that's a route to getting things done
more quickly.

-- 
Geoff Teale
Cmed Technology <gteale(a)cmedltd.com&gt;
Free Software Foundation <tealeg(a)members.fsf.org&gt;

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 04:37:45AM -0600, Ian Pilcher wrote:
>  Tim Waugh wrote:
>  >You have to file bugs, or these things won't get fixed.  Can't fix
>  >things we don't know about!
>  
>  Start fixing bugs that are filed, and maybe people will file some more. 
Thats a good way of making sure your bugs get kill-filed. Go ask your
mother about the words "please" and "thank you"

[tony]

Le mar 02/03/2004 à 11:24, Tim Waugh a écrit :

>  > Upgrading wiped all the cups folders especially the one
> containing the
>  > windows ppd files...
>  > 
>  > So much as I hate to say it I have to go along with ESR on this one.
>  
>  You have to file bugs, or these things won't get fixed.  Can't fix
>  things we don't know about! 
I wasn't sure that this was a bug... I am the kind of user who blames
himself first then looks for solutions and bugs people as an extreme
last resort (as in the case of broken fedora 2.6.1 -> kernel that
prevents Vmware 3.2.x from working).

>  This is the first time I've ever heard of this.  Please file a
> bug
>  report, and say in it what method you used for
>  
>  a) installing cups in the first place 
Ftp install of Redhat Linux 9.0 - cups is standard print driver if I
remember.

>  b) setting up printers 
Used the web interface + instructions on how to install the adobe driver
for windows so manual configuration of smb.conf and manual edit of
cups.conf. The printer was visible as ipp printer in Mac OS X.

>  c) upgrading 
yum update to Fedora Core 1 when it came out.

The gnome configuration tool and the web interface create two different
config files. Local printing and desktop printing work just fine. But I
have Windows NT in Vmware and a Windows 2000 client (other half's work
machine) and a Mac running OX X 10.2.x which can't connect.

cups may be a very cool replacement for lpd but it is not easy to set up
and run in mixed environnement. The docs suck but that is not your
fault. The gnome setup interface shows promise but printer sharing does
not work as advertised... Sorry.

Cheers

Tony Grant

-- 
www.tgds.net Library management software toolkit