fedora users contribution

[Christoph Höger]

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Valent Turkovic schrieb:
> Hi, I'm not aware of a better mailing list to bring this issue so if
> there is please point me to it (fedora-advisory-board?
> fedora-marketing?).
> 
> I as a fedora users contribute in ways I can; mainly bug reporting on
> issues I discover while just using fedora. I don't go actively looking
> for bugs but I just post ones I find using fedora. I try to use fedora
> in the most conservative way possible - not installing any rpm outside
> official repositories if possible (I still need a few that are from
> livna). I have changed my behavior (I previously installed from wide
> range of 3rd party repos and custom twaked fedora much more) so that I
> can be a responsible bug reporter.
> 
> When I posted RFE[1] "Abillity to remove unwanted partition icons from
> gnome desktop" I got an answer from Jef Spaleta that was really
> helpful to me but I recognized that some of less knowledgeable fedora
> users wouldn't find that answer helpful.
> 
> Thank you Jef once more for a really informative answer.
> 
> Coming from a regular fedora desktop user point of view this looks
> like wrong way of doing things. Knowledgeable fedora users and
> contributers usually don't have problems with following instructions
> that experienced fedora devels give them, but still there are others
> that have.  There are fedora users that I believe can be involved in
> some part making fedora better but aren't because of high learning
> curve and the lack of knowledge of inner workings of fedora and
> general linux distros.
> 
> Take me for example - if  Jef haven't told me about
> 20-storage-methods.fdi I wouldn't know exactly where to look. I have
> some basic knowledge about hal but that is it. I love getting involved
> and learning new things in linux but my work and other commitment
> (running a NGO, local LUG and municipal wireless project) don't give
> me time needed to get to know in detail all the inner workings of
> linux and it's sub systems.
> 
> I also believe that there lots of other users that don't know anything
> about how linux and fedora work but that also have some suggestion
> about how to make Fedora and general linux experience better for them
> (and problaly other people also). I believe that they wouldn't go
> beyond posting to mailing list or maybe, maybe to bugzilla.
> 
> I know that this is not up to you, but is there somebody that ordinary
> users could go and ask for their issues to be looked at and then
> decided if there is a case for it to be dealt with. When I mean dealt
> with I mean that that person then contacts the ones responsible for
> the issue at hand.
> 
> Fedora devels give really informative responses and I can work with
> but there are others that can't. What I suggest is that with slight
> different approach and different organization effort much more of such
> issues would be dealt in faster way and things would go forward faster
> and make everybody happy.
> 
> I don't know in detail how fedora is organized, but I guess that one
> volonteer or one redhat developer working part time on such issues
> would make a huge difference.
> 
> Please let's discuss this and thank you in advance,
> Valent.
> 
> [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=426907
> 

Hi,

these are problems you are probably always going to have, because the
wast majority of people is just not interested in "how things work".
This is not wrong from a user friendly point of view but leads to the
fact that most users are even unable to ask the right questions or
unwilling to read some guidelines.
So if you open up a BB or something for newbies, you will probably get
99.9% of questions which are correctly answered by RTFM or are even not
understandable.
Best way to help those users in particular problems is IMO a direct
personal approach with really friendly (and patient) supporters.
So I think the best solution would be to encourage those supporters
everywhere to translate the problems into geekish and send them to the
right points. Although some polls or stuff could help too.

christoph


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