Re: [mylar-dev] dev build for 3.3M7 (Eugene's flame)

[Eugene Kuleshov <eu@xxxxxxxx>]

Mik Kersten wrote:
> >  Also note that average user won't complain about some feature he
> > is not aware of. No offense but it is purely lack of imagination.
>
> All: please note that this tone of communication goes completely 
> against the mantra of our project and is not reflective of how other 
> committers think of the user community.  For a long time our 
> communication philosophy has been stated as:
>
> "Our philosophy is that the user is always right...
Sorry, I forgot to mention that I was wearing my "user hat", so I not 
supposed to be wrong. Well, I was extreme in expressing the situation, 
but you can substitute "too shy" instead which really lead to the same 
result for the project.

Anyways it wasn't meant to discourage discussion, but completely 
opposite. There is no reason to be shy or hide some opinion.
> I never cease to be amazed at the quality of the feedback of both 
> newcommers and seasoned users to suggest features, new ideas, and 
> variations on the existing UI.  
Well, I didn't meant to make impression that quality of feedback is low 
or something. I am hungry for feedback myself and when I don't see 
enough of it, it drives me crazy, especially when you are using absence 
of feedback to make certain decisions.

Let me explain. Looking at both dev mailing list and the newsgroup one 
can get a feeling that for the most part those contain conversation 
between you and me (well, maybe I should shut up, so someone else would 
have chance to say something) and some occasional complains about broken 
update sites. I am tempted to compile some stats, but quick scan give us 
some averages of 1..2 messages a day.
On the other hand your download stats shows that there are thousands of 
users.
Now we can make certain assumptions based on those two numbers:

-- Most of the Mylar users are completely passive (for whatever reason, 
including complete happiness with the product)
-- There are few unhappy ones (number is probably within few dozen) who 
complain about something not working
-- Few users with ideas or patches (some of them are accounted in the 
iplog, but I think number is close or less then number of complains).

Now, when you are saying that you haven't got any requests for some 
feature and want to drop it, you making decision on 
statistically-incomplete data. So, my interpretation of the same data is 
that feature should stay and should evolve because nobody asked to 
remove it.

Mik, I should also mention that you, as a project lead, is not really 
doing enough to publicize and promote project and too much focused on 
the technical issues and support. You are, no doubt, busy man, but this 
activity is also important for the project success, especially for the 
open source one and I think it is one of the reasons why most of the 
Mylar users are passive.

I was surprised to learn that there are number of popular Eclipse 
projects have no clue what Mylar is and why they would benefit from 
integration with Mylar. It took me couple minutes to explain idea of 
Task Context to Aptana folks at the JavaOne and it was total news to them.

regards,
Eugene