Simon Lees wrote:
On 12/23/20 8:00 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
We have asked everyone interested in providing support to join the dedicated support list.
I suggest you (the Board) have obviously failed in attracting sufficiently of those which means people are looking elsewhere for support, such that even esteemed board members ask TW questions on factory.lists. Having two-three lists offering support is simply confusing.
Yes we have a naming problem, we have one place where we would like people to go for support but 2-3 places that could seem like a good place to go for support.
It is really not a matter of naming, I would suggest. If we have a single place where we (as a community) offer support for our distributions, people will come. I think that is what we need to focus on, not what to name it.
It is not someones right to post a question to a developer list and expect an answer because they don't believe they will get it elsewhere.
What happens when they don't get it elsewhere?
In many cases there are places they can go, such as upstream communities etc who are often more knowledgeable on specific topics,
Whereas they will have little idea what has just gone into openSUSE.
if they really need a guarantee of help then they should also consider a distro with enterprise grade support such as SLE.
Please Simon, can we stick to the topic at hand? Nobody is asking about gurantees. We are talking about people who might feel it is his/her "right to post a question to a developer list and expect an answer" - iow, we are talking Tumbleweed, not Leap and not SLE.
I have also been around long enough to know there are some questions that no one can figure out.
Certainly there is, but that is surely irrelevant?
We have had many complaints from developers about the "Noise" on that list which has lead to some people unsubscribing and or missing important discussions.
I guess it is prudent to note that developers are nothing without users, just as users are nothing without developers.
Agreed, however users need to respect developers time especially volunteer developers who only have limited time. In the same way developers should respect users time by not releasing untested code and expecting users to test and find all the bugs.
I also suggest developers and maintainers ought to recognise and accept their responsibility to support their users.
Simon, you neglected to actually address the problem I brought up :
I wonder if the issue we (as a community) have with factory.lists, is about support for Tumbleweed. People/users look to us for help with Tumbleweed, which is most easily available on factory, but as user questions are most often not development related, they are essentially considered off-topic.
Maybe, however from my experience there are many developers who were subscribed to opensuse@ to provide support, who left because of the volume of off topic traffic (a similar thing was happening with factory@ hence the changes), so some of the challenge is convincing developers that subscribing to support@ is worth there time again.
If you were to check it out, you'll find plenty of off-topic chitter-chatter on the support list too.
With a development community our size we need a clear place for development discussions where a large percentage of developers feel comfortable to subscribe and contribute,
Agree. Also, with a user community our size we need a clear place for user support where a large percentage of users feel comfortable to subscribe and receive qualified support. Also for Tumbleweed, which we are promoting as a key openSUSE distro.
the feedback we as the board were getting was a number of developers were unsubscribing or considering unsubscribing from factory@ due to the fact it was no longer mostly development discussion so as a board we had to act in some way. I guess another alternative could have been creating a new devel list and leaving factory as it was but then we still would have had multiple places for support so we decided to try and consolidate that instead before deciding on any further action.
All water under the bridge, let us ignore whatever bad decisions were made and focus on what to do now. For starters, I say merge the support lists back into to the users list. Then I suggest tasking the Board with finding ideas for how to improve support for Tumbleweed users, without clogging up the factory list. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (-0.2°C) Member, openSUSE Heroes