Fedora 11 Test Day survey

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 06/03/2009 09:25 PM, James Laska wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback!
> 
> On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 20:16 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>
>>> 5. What follow-up actions do you expect after the Test Day?  Are
>> your
>>> expectations currently being met?
>>
>> Yes. Although I was hoping there would be a test day for Ext4.
> 
> I was too, but there were some schedule conflicts which kept it from
> happening on the QA side.  In the end the only test day topic with focus
> on ext4 was around changing the anaconda default filesystem to ext4
> (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-02-05).

With concerns over Ext4, I did my own testing and didn't find any issues
and now run with Ext4 on this laptop except for /boot. However that is a
key piece and it would have raised the confidence level to have a
dedicated test day. Having test days built into the release schedule
would help everyone provide more feedback and I (and likely others)
would have raised this earlier than I did in that case.

IMO, the most important thing the recent QA efforts including test days
having brought in is a change in general mentality. Earlier when users
would hit some regressions or new bugs, they would come up to the forum
and get told by others to expect breakage since Fedora is meant to be
that way. I found that a very dangerous stand point since it effectively
means that over time, we will get lower quality with not enough people
raising a concern since they have been told to live with it. Now with
the QA efforts, even if users do hit bugs which I am sure they will,
many would atleast be aware that a community is involved in helping to
avoid them and fix them otherwise. We are more visibly concerned about
quality now than ever before.

Last week in distrowatch, there was a question raised on the Fedora
release delays as to whether such delays are a strength or a weakness

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090601&mode=67#comments

You can find a very consistent feedback from everyone that they
appreciate the stand point of willing to delay a release if needed.
While I think delays *are* a sign of a weakness at some level, it is
good to prioritize critical fixes over a rigid schedule. Even without
all the other benefits, the visibility in approach itself is worth all
the effort you and others have put into this. Thanks.

Rahul