On Sat, 2005-11-12 at 00:57 +0000, 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. > > 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.
We aren't talking about something that is completely foreign to people. They already have a notice about files in /etc and already know to do what portage tells them. How exactly would having a web page that the user doesn't even know exists yet confuse them when they see the "You have 5 unread news messages. Please use: "enews read all" to view them."? Remember that we're talking about the same users that currently have no idea where to go to get news. They aren't going to suddenly subscribe to gentoo-announce or check out news.gentoo.org on a whim and get confused. > 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". Ehh... I also take that most of our users are not idiots. If they see a message from emerge *in a place that isn't hidden in compiler text* then they will pay attention to it. I know that if I were to suddenly run "up2date -u" on a system and it told me that I should run "rpm --rebuildb" due to a change in RPM's database format at the end of it, I would do so, whether I was aware that Red Hat had posted this information on errata.redhat.com or not. > 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. > > > By your own admission, you want to reach 100% of > > the users. The only effective way to do this is to essentially carpet > > bomb the information into several mediums, all containing the *same* > > information. Think about how advertising works. The idea is to put > > your "product", the news, in our case, in front of as many eyes as > > possible. This is best done by utilizing all of the media available to > > us. > > That's not my experience of how advertising works. > > My experience with advertising is that you place your product, service, > or message where your target audience is most likely to see it and be > affected by it. Most bang for your buck, if you like. The placement > creates the context for the advert. This only happens in cases of limited financial backing. If you control the mediums on which you are advertising, you would do it differently. Especially if you are not selling any ads to anyone else. > Most advertising carries what the marketdroids term a "call to action" - > something that tells the reader how to buy the product, or whatever. > Some advertising is about raising general brand awareness (something > Orange was exceptional at), so that the reader will think of the firm > and its products at a point in the future. > > Carpet-bombing, by comparison, goes against commonly observed human > psychology. If you tell people the same thing too many times, they stop > listening to you. Blitzing people just leaves them too shocked to > absorb the message. > > But if you introduce something gradually, you can then turn up the > volume, so to speak, without people being unsettled by it. There's two > great stories in R. V. Jones "Most Secret War" where Dr. Jones used this > principle to play practical jokes on people he knew during his Oxford > days, for example. > > I hope that the technical solution will allow users to choose to see > news about packages that are not installed - so that we can deliver news > that isn't strictly package related, such as new Gentoo LiveCDs, or a > Gentoo event, or so that we can deliver news where the package isn't yet > in the tree (f.ex. announcing a new overlay, or Gentoo-hosted project). This is where I disagree with you completely. As a Gentoo user, I could give a damn about a few developers getting together in the UK, and would be pretty pissed off if Gentoo had this sort of garbage mixed in with the critical information. This entire thing came about due to the need to get *critical* information to our users. If users are interested in non-critical information, there's already a mechanism in place for them to get such things. They can join the mailing lists. Do we not already have a gentoo-events list? We also have a gentoo-releng list, or gentoo-announce. > I'm not hoping for a 100% perfect technical solution straight away. I am. Anything less at this point is a half-assed design. The *design* should be 100% from the start. While implementation can occur in stages, you should not design as you go. > 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. > > Best regards, > Stu -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux
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