On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo@kde.org> wrote:

Hi.

A question that nags at me from time to time is how to manage the results of
press reviews better.

We have the press announcement list which is working wonders thanks to those
managing that resource, such as Sebas. This allows us to shape and manage the
verbage and focus of reviews fairly well.

Yes, I'd cite the two biggest hindrances for me personally to contribute more to release notes/press release info:

1) Up-to-date builds that are easily accessible (as you cite here)
2) Up-to-date and accurate Release Goals and Feature Plans (so I know what to look for on what's changing) on TechBase.

Something that I still notice over and over again in reviews, however, is that
writers often take the software for a "test drive". This is problematic
because:

* package quality varies from OS to OS
* the packages available sometimes differ substantially from upstream
* it requires the reviewer to spend time installing and setting up a KDE test
bed OS, which I imagine takes time away from actually reviewing it

So these reviews end up short on content and are more reviews of our
downstream partner's products (Kubuntu, OpenSuse, Mandriva, etc) rather than
KDE's actual work. How many times have we read "$FOO kind of sucks in KDE 4.2
.." when $FOO was actually a downstream modification? Far, far too often.

I'd like to suggest something different this time around: let's make a virtual
machine available to the press that they can download and start right from
their desktop/laptop. This will allow us to pre-select which packages they
use, provide additional content (e.g. we should have the press release,
screenshots, etc included on the VM image; perhaps with a folderview open to
that directory?) and lower the effort it takes to review KDE.

I have an account on Suse's Studio beta platform which allows me to create
VM's with a few clicks of a button. I'm working with them to hopefully get
some fairly clean upstream packages available there and we should be able to
include our own information packs.

Thoughts? Interested helpers (paritcularly on getting the info pack ready for
inclusion)?

--
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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