[Phoronix] Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Fedora 11 Performance

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2009-06-13 at 00:47 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> > I know its a pipe dream...the laypress taking a proactive interest in
> > seeing problems resolved instead of just talking about them.
> 
> I don't think it's ever going to happen. The laypress should just die,
> people need to go directly to the developers to get actual information.

Right, because developers are legendarily happy to spend their days
painstakingly explaining things to people with little clue. ;)

Seriously, I agree with many of your complaints about 'the
press' (especially the general interest tech press) when it comes to
'reviewing distributions', but I find it worthwhile to spend time wading
through the acres of reviews, because there is the occasional nugget of
useful feedback in there if you look hard enough, and if you spend some
time developing a relationship with the people who write the reviews,
you can a) get more useful information out of them to feed to developers
in a proper fashion, and b) subtly influence them towards producing
slightly nicer reviews in future, by making sure they have useful
information available and understand how certain things work when
they're writing their reviews. I've found quite a lot of reviewers are
actually quite smart and savvy guys (and even file bug reports - yes,
it's true!), but they're often working to word limits and writing for
audiences (and clueless editors...), and a detailed explanation of
complex issues doesn't play well in that context.

Of course, that's something that should more be done by
community/pr-focused people, not developers, probably. Developers have
more immediately valuable things to spend their time on, for which their
expertise is obviously much better suited. Which is all as it should be.
I would agree developers shouldn't spend too much time reading crappily
written reviews :) you guys have better things to do.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net