Is F12 ready to upgrade ? Is it worth it ?

[Tim]

On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 12:53 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> It surprises me that there is not a greater attempt
> to get feed-back on the frequency of problems,
> or equally, the lack of problems.
> I would have thought it would be relatively easy
> to design an online form that Fedora users
> could be asked to complete.

It has been done before, but I can see all sorts of things against it.

You really need to survey people some time after the install.  When
they've had time to get their computer through its teething problems,
and have had time to try it all and see if it works or not.

Whereas surveying people immediately after the install just checks out
whether the install worked, or not.  Some will say all is fine, but
without really checking whether their computer does work fine, simply
because the installation seemed to go well.  Or you get a fail, as they
couldn't install, and gave up.  Whereas their computer might have
worked, if only some small obstacle could have been overcome (e.g. with
one of my old computers, all that was needed to be able to install
Fedora was to unplug the IDE zip drive).

People would rather not go through a lengthy survey, and a short one is
probably going to be too useless.  And with any survey you get people
who deliberately feed false data (either to waste your time, or just
quickly get through some parts of a survey).  It is quite an art to
construct a good survey, many surveys are not.  You've also got to do
something useful with the data.

We had the smolt thing that sends a hardware report off to a database.
There's a certain presumption that regular monthly updates by your
client indicates that your hardware does actually work.

See:  http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/ (and don't forget to have a look
at the various statistics).

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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