Open question to all developers.

[Kelly Miller]

On June 25, 2008 5:48:22 pm FiNeX wrote:
> One big problem is that users want features. Tom, our example user,
> probably have read something about feature X, somewhere on the web, Tom
> maybe want X and Y. He try a 0.x version, probably X and Y aren't there,
> maybe X is in trunk and Y planned for 4.2... who knows this info? Some
> knows developers, some infos are on the commit log, some else are on the
> wiki, some is in b.k.o and maybe on some blog entries in Planet.
> At this point Tom try to ask it on b.k.o (Tom is not a skilled user, it is
> more easy that he doesn't use the ML).
> Tom is a common user which doesn't like to read, moreover on bugzilla there
> are a lot of reports, so Tom doesn't look if X and Y are already there; Tom
> will ask again about X and Y, he want it and he doesn't understand that it
> has been planned, he is an user and (sorry for being rude) he doesn't like
> to reason out. At this point Tom expect X and Y, but developers are
> exausted to repeat all the same things, they doesn't know what to do more
> than they already did.
> So Tom could think that KDE is a failure because his needs are not
> satisfied and the communication were not good.

Oh, I can confirm this, seeing as I'm back in yet another argument of this 
kind at Groklaw, likely posted by the same three guys who have been bringing 
up these arguments over and over again.

I'm not sure the problem actually is that no one knows where the info is 
(though indications are that there might be problems there); from what I've 
seen, most of the problems come from users who have used random versions of 
KDE4 (most commonly the parts labelled ALPHA) and believe that KDE4 will 
always be like this, forgetting that similar sorts of things happen whenever a 
new major version of anything is released.  For example, the most common 
complaint I've seen so far is that the KDE desktop "does not act like a 
desktop", though what the user in question really means is that KDE is not 
imping more Windows features.  Although I can (and do) repeatedly tell them 
how to handle this, most of them simply turn around and repeat, verbatim, the 
same arguments a short time later.

Sometimes I start to wonder if some of these characters are in fact shilling 
for someone else.
 
>> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<