Stuart Herbert wrote:
On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 18:22 -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
It seems to be your own quest to have the news *only*
delivered by portage.
I thought I'd been very clear in the email that you've replied to that I
support making the news available via other ways. It's the timing that
I'm a bit worried about.
And that worries me. Because you more or less suggest to postpone
implementing (just activating) traditional solutions, being used by many
equivalent others in our field (works for them, more or less) in favour
of an experimental new thing.
I would just do it the other way around: do your experiment after the
traditional channels are set up, and let your experiment rely on the
solid base those traditional solutions give.
I've managed a few change programmes over the years, and I've had the
most success when a change happened in stages. The issues centre on the
ability of a large body of people to understand the change that has been
introduced. People find change itself confusing. If something isn't
given time to bed in, people never quite understand the original change,
and this undermines the benefits of introducing the change.
You are probably right here. So why not doing the obvious steps? Just
activate now the traditional ways of getting news to the users. In the
mean-time you work on getting GLEP42 implemented and accepted, and by
the time it more or less works, you have a wonderful base to announce
this new feature on, and sell it as "personalised sophisticated news
delivery".
We live and breathe Gentoo daily, and we understand this news thing
because we've invested time and effort to kick it back and forward here
on -dev. The vast majority of our users haven't had that luxury, and
it'll take a while for them to "get it".
Another good reason to start with the 'common' things. The traditional
ways some of your 100% of our users will be common with. Nothing new
there for them. The portage way *is* new, and has never been done,
hence they might have difficulties to "get it".
If the majority don't agree with me, not a problem; I'm not going to
stop you (like I could anyway!) from putting out multi-channel from day
one.
But if it was my decision, I'd roll out one channel first, and the
others later.
See above why I think that is just the wrong order, though I support
your 'phased' roll out.
I'm not hoping for a 100% perfect technical solution straight away.
Release early, release often is the F/OSS way. Once we've agreed on
something that's fit for purpose, let's implement it, deploy it, get to
the tipping point, see how users react, and then improve it.
Please remember that many of your 100% of our users hates software that
doesn't work. It wouldn't be the first time a user decides never to use
a piece of software again, because his/her first experience with it was
very bad. You'd lose a few bits of your 100% making it impossible to
reach your own goal.
I would seriously test this (hence not release early), if you happen to
make an error and deliver all news messages at once to the user, you
might end up in having the same as that very user that ignored
etc-update because it had so much items to update.
--
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo for Mac OS X Project -- Interim Lead
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