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Fedora's New Test Lead Plans Changes
lisah writes "According to a NewsForge article by Bruce Byfield, new Fedora test lead Will Woods has a laundry list of changes he plans on making to enhance the Fedora testing process. 'There's always someone who will comment that Fedora is just Red Hat's beta test for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),' says Woods. 'It's not true, and I want no one to have cause to say that ever again.'"
From the article: "First introduced to testing at Compaq and IBM, Woods gained enough experience that he was hired two years ago when Red Hat needed someone to develop test automation tools." Testing at Compaq? Compaq tests things!?
Did it take anyone else about five tries to parse that headline?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
I hope they fix that nasty bug with Rhythmbox where it shipped with no list of internet radio stations whatsoever, as well as no mp3, aac, or wma support. That sort of defeated the whole point of the application. And I couldn't help but notice that the Totem movie player, can't actually play any movies. Oh, and the helix player doesn't actually work either. The workarounds consist of upgrading from unsupported repositories and generally mucking about in your root account.
Hopefully these new test procedures will be able to identify the problems with these applications and, if found unfixable, the applications in question will be removed from the repositories.
May the Maths Be with you!
The summary seems to imply that Fedora will now be less a beta for RHEL but the article discusses in depth how Fedora is now going to be using testing tools from RHEL and how they obviously have obligations to RHEL. If this doesn't provide more evidence that Fedora *is* just a beta for RHEL I don't what will.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
It's nice to see them acknowledge a testing issue, and present options to the community on how to best approach the problem.
The amazing thing is all of the people that are critical of Fedora. Even if it were a testbed for RedHat, it is a free distro. that is widely used--especially by the critics. I have no problems with it, and we use it on several development machines here.
If the critics would step up and help solve the problems, they'd quickly run out of things to complpain about.
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
I think Fedora 4 release was the best one so far. Fedora 5 ...well they kind of just dropped the ball. Seems as if it was rushed to get it out the door. On the web you can find countless complaints about stuff being broken in it. As for the UI I don't think they bothered to ask anyone other than the engineer, designers about its practicalibilty and usability.
Sure the way it was designed make perfect sense to the designer, but to an average Joe its confusing and does not make since.
Perhaps take a page from SUSE on this issue(SUSE has there problems to, but they did good with this one). They literally for the Enterprise Desktop 10 went out to the streets, literally and asked people who had none or little experience on computers to come to there labs and test the level of ease of use and design of there OS. Did it make sense, was it easy to find stuff, could you figure out quickly what to do. These were some of there core questions and issues they wanted to address.
So many complaints about usability. It's a common affliction of software developers, engineers and the like to design stuff from there point of view. This makes sense but only from there position. To the user it can be confusing and difficult to use. Fedora should try to incorporate some of these ideas and practices into there design model. Stop relying so much on the devoted parts of the community to tell you if it's a good design, or if it works well. These parts of the community have been at it a long time, they know a lot, and particular how to hack and work around a problem. In fact there is a kind of status from being smart enough to be able to problem solve some of the OS short comings. To a laymen it means nothing, but hours of frustration trying to find or figure out how to do something.
Stuff to fix or improve.
1. The setup procedure need to be revamped. Fedora 5 did a nasty thing by removing your ability to make choices. Is is like they wanted to homogenize your choices. You only had a few types of setups to choose from and that's what you were left with once chosen. You were not able to add or subtract certain packages from the initial setup.
The whole having to have a internet connection for YUM after setup to be able to install software from the DVD or CD's is a nightmare. I know many, many people that simple do not want the machine connected to the internet. For the solution you have to go hacking around config files to bypass this fopa. That is simple unacceptable to a user.
2. If your going to update over the internet using YUM. Make it far easier than it is now. You still have to go into the config files and set mirrors and such. Many of the mirror names have no common convention for naming. So you have to guess at what is the correct way to enable a mirror or server for updates. The update tool should automate this. For example it should contact a central server for a list of update and package mirrors in your area. Did you get that in your area. A dialog box pops up asking you for your zip code or such and uses that information when communicating with the central server for a list of local mirrors. It then nicely writes the location or info the update program needs to contact those update, software mirrors for you, automatically. You don't have to dig around in config files its done for you. Of course you should retain the ability to pick other update, package server, mirrors, far away if you like.
3. And last don't rush it. If it takes an extra 2 to 3 months just so you can get it right then that is absolute fine.
A simple thing... i want to create a playlist. I want to take 10 of my MP3 files and make a playlist that RealPlayer would play.
So far I have been unable to do this. If there is a way to do this, how come it is not intuitive at all?
And I wish there was something with the simplicity of WinAMP - a player that supports MANY patented file types, and is available for... FREE. If there was a player like that for Linux that you could install with the ease of RealPlayer, I would have been VERY happy. As it stands, to install something requires endless hunt for the right libraries. I had FC4 installed, and ended up upgrading to FC5 since many libraries could not be installed via yum due to circulatory reference (to install i need verion x of library A, and to install library A I need version y of library B, etc...)
Fedora is just Red Hat's beta test for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)...