[Sugar-devel] Making OLPC / Sugar Labs more approachable (was: Re: OLPC 10.1.2 Release Candidate 1)

[Ed McNierney]

Brenda -

I'm assuming your teachers and education ministry decision makers don't normally interact with OLPC by asking questions on OLPCNews forums, which was the context and the specific question I was answering.  The topic of, "what are all the ways all interested parties worldwide communicate with OLPC" is obviously a far more complex one, and not one I was attempting to answer.  But people interested in communicating with OLPC and/or Sugar Labs should be able to find either of us - we usually try to point newcomers to our wiki at http://wiki.laptop.org.  It's not perfect, but it's a good way to find pointers.

But it is absolutely true that anyone who is volunteering (or getting paid) to test OLPC software and hardware should know how to submit a trac ticket.  That is the mechanism we use to track reported problems, so using trac should be an essential part of the training any volunteer tester should get.  While everyone likes nicely-researched and well-written problem reports, that shouldn't be an obstacle.  If there's information missing on a ticket, people working on it can ask for more.  But if the ticket's not there at all, we won't know there's a problem to fix.

	- Ed

On Aug 8, 2010, at 6:00 PM, Brenda Wallace wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 9:36 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Christoph Derndorfer
>> <christoph.derndorfer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 3:56 PM, Ed McNierney <ed at laptop.org> wrote:
>>>> 1. Report bugs at http://dev.laptop.org/newticket - if necessary, register
>>>> first at http://dev.laptop.org/register (as mavrothal kindly points out)
>>>> 2. If you have interesting experiences or user information to contribute,
>>>> please do so at http://wiki.laptop.org
>>>> 3. If you're unwilling to perform steps 1 and/or 2 as appropriate, please
>>>> don't expect the bug to be fixed, or for anyone else to even know about it.
>>> 
> <snip>
>>> The core here is that software developers seem very reluctant to step out of
>>> their own comfort zone when it comes to processes and tools (a.k.a. point 3
>>> a.k.a. "my way or the highway") yet consistently expect teachers and other
>>> XO and Sugar users to do exactly that.
>> 
>> What was the context for Ed's post? And who was his intended audience?
>> Certainly not the end user. In .uy we have discussed various
>> mechanisms for bug reporting by children and teachers. The current
>> plan of record is to use some sort of web form where the bugs are
>> aggregated by a technical liaison. The liaison might then be trained
>> in filing the occasional ticket on Trac. As with any software (and
>> hardware) project, different people in the support hierarchy utilize
>> different tools.
> 
> It will need re-wording if this it something seen by the volunteers
> who test sugar and activities in their own time each week - some of
> them are the our teachers or education ministry decision makers. Can
> the same be said without it sounding like "do it our way or go away"?
> -- Item 3 probably could be dropped completely. It's not welcoming,
> and makes the project seem unapproachable.
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel