On Tue 06 Jan 2009 02:04:29 NZDT +1300, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
I think the focus of discussion should be more about how we can improve the experience, thus making people likelier to participate earlier on.
Fully agreed.
Here are reasons why I don't participate as much as I'd like to: * Installation is totally broken. When I have a weekend to do testing, I can install beta X during a third of that, and then play with applications for the rest of it, thus generating useful (and for user acceptance important) bug reports. If after a dreadful installation experience I can foresee that I will be spending the rest of the weekend trying to get the system to a state where I can finally start an application, the period of beta X is over before I've found enough non-existant time during the week to do useful testing. So my metrics for the length of the beta period is the length of time a *testable* beta is available. So if a release doesn't install and it takes 2 weeks to fix (or six weeks, as the case may be), then extend following milestones by that much, or consider the beta period shortened. This is the main reason I didn't file any reports for 11.1. * Lack of test environment. I need a stable and dependable computer for daily use. I don't have the reasources to be an identical new computer just for testing. The old computer(s) are inefficient, and nobody cares about their driver-related bugs. It would really help if there were good rundowns of how to test the current beta on the previous(!) (preferably two) stable releases - what the options are, and how to use them. I tried vmware once, but it wasted more time on vmware itself than what it was worth. The beta guest didn't run properly either, and just forget about any time-related software. There was always one more peice of whatnot to install in the guest which wasn't readily available and would have taken heaps of time to obtain. Too inefficient to do useful beta testing with. Running a risk of being forced to say "no I can't do this for you right now because my Linux is broken" is not an option when I keep saying to people they should try Linux over XYZ because things just work today, tomorrow, and the day after. Of course it's also my fault that I haven't put together that wiki page. * A large part why I participate in testing is so that I end up with a system which works reliably and is reasonably bug free in the areas I use myself. Finding that bugs I reported are still present in GM is disillusioning. For example I have given up on counting the years I've entered the same bugs now for RAID1 use on a desktop machine (IMHO it's nuts not to use it, yet it doesn't work out of the box unless you know what you're doing). If each release has 5 bugs fixed and 3 new ones (and sometimes 3 fixed, 5 new) then it's too much like Microsoft. If my efforts make a difference here I'd be more motivated. * Nothing to do with SUSE: my weekends are too full with everything else... ;) Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org