On Thu, 09 Aug 2012 12:28:26 -0500, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:
I believe the heart of the frustration for why this topic keeps coming up over the years is not about what's right or wrong with the infrastructure, but that the community itself doesn't really have any control over the infrastructure. In our openSUSE community, we're a community of "just do it"-ers. People see something that they feel needs to be worked on or is interesting enough to them, they can just step up and do it.
That makes sense, and yes, there is an element of "we can't touch that part of the infrastructure". I do have regular contact with those who do, so I do what I can - but certainly in terms of changing the registration form or something like that - no, that's not something we would have access to.
Obviously, they cannot do that when it comes to the infrastructure that we live in here. We are unable to assign work to handle certain points of our infrastructure. We are unable to utilize the many and varied expertise within the community. We can't even say "Well fine, you're gonna complain? Here, you fix it!" Can we ever get to a point where we can do that, with existing infrastructure or new infrastructure? I don't know. But until somehow community feels it has a measure of control, influence and sense of ownership over its infrastructure, this topic will always keep cropping up.
Absolutely. But identifying if there's a problem vs. the convenience (and it certainly would be a HUGE convenience for the community to manage it) and weighing those factors is something that does need to be identified. Classic benefit analysis would apply to that. If the bottom line is control, then let's talk about it in terms of control rather than in terms of an unmeasured/possibly unmeasurable number of people who gave up before they got started. Convenience and control is something that's measurable. But having a relatively small group of people who regularly bring it up very loudly doesn't increase the size or scope of the issue. It's not a "loudness" debate, nor does it have to be. Maybe someone like Alan or the Boosters team could help us here in terms of working with the internal team that manages this registration process to create a second path that asks for a very minimal amount of information. I don't see that exporting the user data into our own datastore is likely for legal reasons (since there is corporate data as well as openSUSE user data in the datastore itself) - but I could be wrong about that. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org