On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 11:40:29AM +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
> So I was wondering if we shouldn't have a list of user-centered
> "stable release goals", such as "open a PDF attachment in icedove",
> "open an OpenDocument attachment in icedove", "watch youtube videos",
> "copy a file to a USB key", which people trying a fresh testing
> install could test.
<snip>
> I however do not see an obvious way of collecting feedback for such user
> tasks, or for having fights over which user tasks are the most
> significant, without having people submit tasks to the release managers
> and the release managers deciding which ones are worth making official,
> which would be quite a burden to them.
>
> Are there ways to set up such a thing so that it mostly manages itself?
I don't know a specific answer on your questions, but I do have some
lateral thinking/discussion to report. At DebConf10, I've spoken with
Philipp Kern about how to invite our users to test Squeeze before we
release it. We have agreed on the fact that we can do better than past
releases on that and the rough idea was to send out a press release
inviting willing users to do upgrades from Lenny to frozen Squeeze and
report the issues they find. We discussed how the best moment to do that
would have been post-freeze and it turns out that this is exactly *that*
moment.
The TODO list to go forward with this is:
- Decide where user feedback will have to go; the obvious answer is the
BTS, but we need to decide whether reuse some existing (pseudo)
package or create a new one for the occasion. IMHO it should be
something quite obvious for the users such as "squeeze" or
"squeeze-upgrades" or something like that.
- Draft a text to send out as press release, the title should probably
be something like "User testing sought to improve the quality of the
forthcoming Debian Squeeze". The debian-publicity@lists.d.o is
wonderful for reviewing this kind of stuff, but we need first to
decide the content of the press release. I propose the following main
points:
- please test upgrades from lenny to (frozen) squeeze
- please test ISOs/d-i
- please report issues THIS WAY
I believe that what you are looking for can later on be extracted from
user reports ... but of course we will need to find out a group of
Debian volunteers to do that triaging. The latter can probably be found
easily if the release team agrees on sending (later on) a specific call
for help via d-d-a (I'm kind of reluctant to add such duty to the
release team, given that they will be super-busy in the near future with
unblock requests and in getting the RC bug count down).
How does this plan sound?
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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