Communication between developers and users

[James Richard Tyrer]

Tom Chance wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I've been thinking about one of the roles of Quality Teams... communication. 
> Supposedly, and hopefully, Quality Teams provide a bridge between developers 
> and users where Bugzilla and developer mailing lists aren't sufficient. I'd 
> appreciate people's thoughts on this, so we can better develop how we work.
> 
> Two examples of where this is needed come to mind:
> 
> 
> 1) An application in KDE could be replaced by a new app.
> 
> Take Kolourpaint and KPaint, for example. Or the Noatun / Kaboodle / Amarok / 
> Juk / Kaffeine / KMplayer mess, for another. Clearly, the decision shouldn't 
> just be up to developers, and many users will have a lot to say about this 
> sort of issue. But currently they can't, really, have any useful input. Read 
> this bug report, for example:
> 
> http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76915
> 
> Lots of opinions are raised, and then the users are shut out of the 
> discussion. (correctly, according to the uses of Bugzilla and mailing lists) 
> 
> 
> 2) A large architecutral change is discussed.
> 
> Take aRts as the case in point here. Should KDE stick with aRts, or change to 
> Gstreamer, or NMM, or some other audio framework? This is a long-term 
> decision with major implications, and yet to an even greater extent than app 
> changes, users have very little input.
> 
> So how can we provide a space for users and developers to interact? The 
> original idea was that Quality Team members would discuss on the developer 
> mailing lists and on "community sites", relaying messages between users and 
> developers. But
> 
> a) Is this enough?
> b) Is this even happening?
> 
> I'd appreciate your thoughts, so we can continue to improve this project.

Developers communicating with users!

You heretic, you will be burned at the stake. :-)

First this should not have been posted as a bug.  We should be permitted to 
close such bugs.

You are correct, there needs to be some bridge between user opinions and 
digested information that developers can use.  One of the things that this 
bridge needs to add is reality.

In this case the reality that needs to be considered is that currently KDE 
has committed to using Xine as the base for multimedia.  So something that 
does not use Xine should only be considered as an additional application at 
least for now.

I have no idea why we have both NoAtun and Kaboodle.  I don't see this as 
dropping one or the other -- they both have dumb names -- but replacing 
then with the KDEMediaPlayer which should include the best features of 
both.  New alternatives are also good, but I don't see this as an either or 
situation.  They can clearly exist in ExtraGear or AddOns, but we need to 
have ONE KDEMediaPlayer with features added as necessary.  The same could 
also be said of the image viewer part.

However, this bergs the question.  The question then become if we are to 
only have a single KDEMediaPlayer, then we need to have input from the 
users as to which features are wanted.

In all cases, the question that needs to be addressed is how to take the 
(some times uninformed) views of the users and distill them down to 
recommendations that can be presented to the developers.

--
JRT