One Hundred Paper Cut Method,
After getting tired of reading this list where almost every user request
has been handled with the standard RTFM reply and dismissed as a newbie
error, I decided to look around at various other Linux distributions. I
even went upstream to find out if anyone had a Linux installation that
would allow me to at least configure my system the way I want it. What
did I find? Basically more of the same - RTFM answers. In each case I
broke the install by installing Firefox and Thunderbird. (Ubuntu acts
freaky once Thunderbird is installed.) I know that the OS Install comes
with a mail client. But what if your user wants a working one instead
of some RTFM incomplete or non-working pre-installed application?
In short, the install of any one new application should never effect the
operation of the entire system. What do I need? Separate Linux
installations for each group of tasks that I may be working on? Really?
So far, Ubuntu has been the most usable, having fewer usability problems
than Debian, which performs much better than the original RTFM provider,
Red-Hat and its more-stable (broken) downstream distros.
My ideal system?
Firefox, Thunderbird
MySQL, Oracle and Zend Optimizer, Apache, PhP, Perl
Open Office (without the email client)
No Bit torrent support. - This does not work any faster in practice
than http/ftp downloads.
Tony Weitekamp
________________________________________________________
Windows .- .- .- .- .Where do you want to go today?
MacOSX .- .- .- .- .-Where do you want to be tomorrow?
Ubuntu .- .- .- .- .-Are you coming or what?
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Today's Topics:
1. Updating PyQt (Heinz A Preisig)
2. Re: Migrating OCaml to 3.11.1 in Karmic? (Mehdi Dogguy)
3. Re: Updating PyQt (Scott Kitterman)
4. Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant when
you triage bugs! (Vincenzo Ciancia)
5. Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant
when you triage bugs! (Vincenzo Ciancia)
6. Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant
when you triage bugs! (Henrique Almeida)
7. Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant
when you triage bugs! (Vincenzo Ciancia)
8. Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant
when you triage bugs! (Sebastien Bacher)
9. Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant
when you triage bugs! (Mikus Grinbergs)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:42:40 +0200
From: Heinz A Preisig <heinz.prei...@chemeng.ntnu.no>
Subject: Updating PyQt
To: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
Message-ID: <4a656360.50...@chemeng.ntnu.no>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Thanks Scott, thus there is no update procedure in place for pyqt, which
is changing quite rapidly? I got the impression that a lot of people are
using it actively. But them I do not know on what I am intrinsically
asking for in terms of effort.
Thanks,
Heinz Preisig
-- Heinz A Preisig Professor of Process Systems Engineering Private:
?vre Bakklandet 62 B, 7013 Trondheim, Norway Department of Chemical
Engineering Norwegian University of Science and Technology N ? 7491
Trondheim, Norway Tel direct: +47 735 92807 Tel mob: +47 9754 1334
e-mail: heinz.prei...@chemeng.ntnu.no
<mailto:heinz.prei...@chemeng.ntnu.no> web: www.chemeng.ntnu.no\~preisig
<http://www.chemeng.ntnu.no/%7Epreisig> ------------------------------
Message: 2 Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:09:44 +0200 From: Mehdi Dogguy
<me...@dogguy.org> Subject: Re: Migrating OCaml to 3.11.1 in Karmic? To:
David MENTRE <dmen...@linux-france.org> Cc:
ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com, Debian OCaml Maintainers
<debian-ocaml-ma...@lists.debian.org> Message-ID:
<4a65f658.7020...@dogguy.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8;
format=flowed David MENTRE wrote:
> > Hello Scott,
> >
> > 2009/7/21 Scott Kitterman <ubu...@kitterman.com>:
>
>> >> How long do you expect?
>>
> >
> > A similar transition took 4 weeks in Debian.
> >
>
Actually, It took 3 weeks :) (considering the rpm transition which
blocked ocaml transition). Hopefully, rpm is now built/installed almost
everywhere [1].
>> >> Can you finish by feature freeze?
>>
> >
> > If we start now, we can hopefully finish by mid-August. As feature
> > freeze is the 27th of August, I think this is doable.
> >
>
IMHO, it will be much faster in Ubuntu and can be done in one week (two
weeks at most).
[1] https://buildd.debian.org/~luk/status/package.php?p=rpm
Cheers,
-- Mehdi Dogguy ???? ????? http://dogguy.org/
------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009
12:31:53 -0400 From: Scott Kitterman <ubu...@kitterman.com> Subject: Re:
Updating PyQt To: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Message-ID:
<89884-snappermsgd8db99b6c68ce...@[75.199.80.18]> Content-Type:
text/plain; charset=US-ASCII On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:42:40 +0200 Heinz A
Preisig <heinz.prei...@chemeng.ntnu.no> wrote:
> >Thanks Scott, thus there is no update procedure in place for pyqt, which
> >is changing quite rapidly? I got the impression that a lot of people are
> >using it actively. But them I do not know on what I am intrinsically
> >asking for in terms of effort.
>
Generally not. We only fix significant bugs post release via patch updates
with only very few exceptions.
Scott K
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:47:04 +0200
From: Vincenzo Ciancia <cian...@di.unipi.it>
Subject: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant when
you triage bugs!
To: ubuntu-b...@lists.ubuntu.com
Cc: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
Message-ID: <4a674288.7040...@di.unipi.it>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed
Dear all,
sorry for crossposting, please notice it before replying to all.
I tend to report all usability bugs I find, in the hope that ubuntu will
become better. The hudred-papercut effort shows that I am not wrong in
reporting those as bugs.
However, it is very easy that a developer does not recognise an
usability-related bug report, and confuses it with a more or less
strange support request, and I often have to discuss to have it accepted
as a bug.
It is typical that on usability bugs I get trapped into endless
discussions (e.g. it's always been like that, it can't be fixed, it's an
obvious behaviour and so on).
In the future, I will try to remember to add a sentence like "this is an
usability related bug report, please handle it as such, I am reporting
it to ease the user experience of the whole ubuntu community" and maybe
link this e-mail, but in the meantime, could developers try to be a bit
more careful in rejecting bugs?
I am NOT going to link specific bugs here, because that would get
personal, but this is becoming tiresome. Today I went to IRC and
convinced a developer that a bug is a usability problem indeed. This
costed me a quarter of hour, in addition to the time spent to identify
and report the bug. He had just closed the bug, without at least
reassigning to ubuntu, because it's not specific to the package I
reported it in. But in that case one reassings it to ubuntu perhaps! The
apparent problem is that he took me for a newbie not understanding an
obvious fact. Which I understood perfectly, but is not correct. In the
end I convinced him, but it was a waste of time and it happened a lot in
the past.
Discussing all the time makes bug reporting an unpleasant experience,
and discourages especially usability reports, as some people tend to
assume a "technician" attitude in thinking these are stupid requests
from unexperienced users. Being constantly confused with a newbie is
also a bit irritating :) especially because I think reporting usability
bugs is something people do not do usually, so we all really need this
kind of things.
Thanks for listening and the work all of you do everyday on my ubuntu,
and thanks to the developer involved in today's discussion because he
did not discuss too much, and as soon as he recognised it as a bug, he
kindly offered cooperation.
Vincenzo
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:00:22 +0200
From: Vincenzo Ciancia <cian...@di.unipi.it>
Subject: Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant
when you triage bugs!
Cc: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
Message-ID: <4a6745a6.3000...@di.unipi.it>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Il 22/07/2009 18:47, Vincenzo Ciancia ha scritto:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > sorry for crossposting, please notice it before replying to all.
> >
>
I am possibly a bit of an idiot for what I did, but luckily the other
list which has nothing to do with my target has a moderator.
I generate too much noise. My apologises.
Vincenzo
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:04:54 -0300
From: Henrique Almeida <hda...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant
when you triage bugs!
To: Vincenzo Ciancia <cian...@di.unipi.it>
Cc: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
Message-ID:
<c23df7cb0907221004p26260ca0rfe9fdeca131d9...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Agreed. Ubuntu developers either don't understand my usability
reports or tag them as low priority bugs, which gets triaged for many
releases. Once I have submitted a bug report on an usability issue
that caused "information loss", which is serious. In certain PDF
files, I can't search for accented characters. This affects not only,
say, evince search, it also affects tracker searches, for example. The
main (non duplicate) bug for this was reported 2 years ago by
lherrmann and, right now, it's tagged as confirmed/unknown,
triaged/low.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/poppler/+bug/116453
This is just an example, I have reported other bugs that have been
ignored for years.
2009/7/22 Vincenzo Ciancia <cian...@di.unipi.it>:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > sorry for crossposting, please notice it before replying to all.
> >
> > I tend to report all usability bugs I find, in the hope that ubuntu will
> > become better. The hudred-papercut effort shows that I am not wrong in
> > reporting those as bugs.
> >
> > However, it is very easy that a developer does not recognise an
> > usability-related bug report, and confuses it with a more or less
> > strange support request, and I often have to discuss to have it accepted
> > as a bug.
> >
> > It is typical that on usability bugs I get trapped into endless
> > discussions (e.g. it's always been like that, it can't be fixed, it's an
> > obvious behaviour and so on).
> >
> > In the future, I will try to remember to add a sentence like "this is an
> > usability related bug report, please handle it as such, I am reporting
> > it to ease the user experience of the whole ubuntu community" and maybe
> > link this e-mail, but in the meantime, could developers try to be a bit
> > more careful in rejecting bugs?
> >
> > I am NOT going to link specific bugs here, because that would get
> > personal, but this is becoming tiresome. Today I went to IRC and
> > convinced a developer that a bug is a usability problem indeed. This
> > costed me a quarter of hour, in addition to the time spent to identify
> > and report the bug. He had just closed the bug, without at least
> > reassigning to ubuntu, because it's not specific to the package I
> > reported it in. But in that case one reassings it to ubuntu perhaps! The
> > apparent problem is that he took me for a newbie not understanding an
> > obvious fact. Which I understood perfectly, but is not correct. In the
> > end I convinced him, but it was a waste of time and it happened a lot in
> > the past.
> >
> > Discussing all the time makes bug reporting an unpleasant experience,
> > and discourages especially usability reports, as some people tend to
> > assume a "technician" attitude in thinking these are stupid requests
> > from unexperienced users. Being constantly confused with a newbie is
> > also a bit irritating :) especially because I think reporting usability
> > bugs is something people do not do usually, so we all really need this
> > kind of things.
> >
> > Thanks for listening and the work all of you do everyday on my ubuntu,
> > and thanks to the developer involved in today's discussion because he
> > did not discuss too much, and as soon as he recognised it as a bug, he
> > kindly offered cooperation.
> >
> > Vincenzo
> >
> > --
> > Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list
> > Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
> > Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
> > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
> >
>
-- Henrique Dante de Almeida hda...@gmail.com
------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009
19:12:59 +0200 From: Vincenzo Ciancia <cian...@di.unipi.it> Subject: Re:
Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant when you triage
bugs! To: Henrique Almeida <hda...@gmail.com> Cc:
ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Message-ID:
<4a67489b.4020...@di.unipi.it> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8;
format=flowed Il 22/07/2009 19:04, Henrique Almeida ha scritto:
> > Agreed. Ubuntu developers either don't understand my usability
> > reports or tag them as low priority bugs, which gets triaged for many
> > releases.
>
This is because these are not crashers and typically just affect a small
portion of the application and of the codebase. My conclusions are that
priorities are absolutely bad for dealing with usability.
Alternative solutions include the use of special tags, special packages
(e.g. the papercut approach) or whatever. But this can only happen if
developers are interested in assigning a separate kind of priority to
usability bugs.
E.g. one may say that a bug is high priority as an usability bug but
certainly it's not going to be prioritised over kernel crashes!
The hundred papercut approach is absolutely perfect, so perhaps a
"papercut-potential" tag, if accepted by developer, would be nice. The
idea being that such tagged bug may have a different meaning for
priorities.
Your mileage may vary. I certailny can't decide :)
Vincenzo
------------------------------
Message: 8
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:18:30 +0200
From: Sebastien Bacher <seb...@ubuntu.com>
Subject: Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant
when you triage bugs!
To: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
Message-ID: <1248290310.25462.2.ca...@seb128-laptop>
Content-Type: text/plain
On mer., 2009-07-22 at 18:47 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
> > However, it is very easy that a developer does not recognise an
> > usability-related bug report, and confuses it with a more or less
> > strange support request, and I often have to discuss to have it
> > accepted
> > as a bug.
>
The issue is that Ubuntu doesn't write most of the softwares it
distribute and the current team doesn't have the manpower to work on
those and isn't well placed to decide on behavior changes that should be
done a software they are not writing. Ideally submitters would open
those bugs upstream too and argue directly there.
Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher
------------------------------
Message: 9
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:53:57 -0400
From: Mikus Grinbergs <mi...@bga.com>
Subject: Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant
when you triage bugs!
To: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
Message-ID: <4a677c65.7020...@bga.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>> >> However, it is very easy that a developer does not recognise an
>> >> usability-related bug report, and confuses it with a more or less
>> >> strange support request, and I often have to discuss to have it
>> >> accepted as a bug.
>>
> >
> > The issue is that Ubuntu doesn't write most of the softwares it
> > distribute and the current team doesn't have the manpower to work on
> > those and isn't well placed to decide on behavior changes that should be
> > done a software they are not writing. Ideally submitters would open
> > those bugs upstream too and argue directly there.
>
I would like to speak up for the users out there - they too might
have only limited resources and time.
The following happened to me on a platform different than Ubuntu,
but has colored my attitude ever since: A beta release failed to
provide one significant multimedia function. I reported it. The
report was rejected (with the notation that I should go upstream),
on the grounds that I had used an application not supplied by the
platform developers. That mode of response upset me:
* *Every* multimedia application I had tried on that particular
beta failed to produce that kind of output, whereas on other
versions those same applications worked correctly -- and I had
said so in my report. I had expected the developers to check
into my claim (of *every* - i.e., that it was the fault of that
beta system), rather than suggesting that it was my fault for
choosing a third-party application. [The application I had
named was the one easiest to install.]
* It would have taken significant effort on my part to discover
whom to contact regarding the application I had named. And in
my mind I could imagine that person's reaction if I requested:
"Although your application works on platform XYZ-111, and on
all other platforms I have tried, it fails to produce the
expected output on beta XYZ-112. Please fix your application."
Let me suggest that Ubuntu appoint an usability triager/ombudsman,
to determine (from the Ubuntu users' perspective, not from an Ubuntu
developers' perspective) how much attention ought to be paid to each
and every usability-related bug report.
mikus
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