You'd think Nokia themselves would write up a single email and send it to maemo-announce or make an announcement here or *something* for people to look at and understand what they are downloading. They have some seriously broken processes. Who does a release without an announcement except the smallest of smallest projects?

Out of curiosity, was the minor update released to 'beta' testers as well as the forthcoming main update, or did the need for the minor update arise from the 'beta' testing of the main one?

it doesn't make a big difference i think, big or not, at this phase everything new is blown with threads. the thing is, helping people that have no idea what is going on. it turned out very nicely if you ask me, with the great update needed for... thread.
you cannot control this, maybe if the info is given on the device while updating.
but many people don't read it and the problems are not to be predicted. they happen afteward, and the problems with problems is, they can not be forseen often.

it turned out ok this time on the whole.
but when the big update comes what needs double the amount of free space on rootfs its going to bring triple the amount of people with problems,
a 24 hour notice to mods will not change much but least they can be around to merge the million of duplicated threads and point them to Help pages

In the future Flandry could use his sticky as a template but from my experience (nothing different from anyone who has been a member here for very long). Whether the sticky came after 2 hours, 18 hours, or even a day before, it would make little difference in forum volume or the quality of the posts.

When something comes along that was anticipated for so long, people are going to post. And of course everyone thinks their opinion or the point they are trying to make is so unique it needs a new thread.

People want to post. They are looking for a reason to post. However, the same people who do not read a thread throughout or bother to see if a subject has been posted before will start a new thread, sometimes in the wrong forum, regardless of the topic.


BTW, stickies are a good thing. I think they should be used more often and depreciated as new topics create new interests. Members may become accustom to them and condition themselves to look there first.

Sticky early, update often... imho.

Neither. It's been planned for forever. PR1.1 is a large update delivering a lot of fixes (including new CMT firmware) and changes needed to be pushed to the update system to allow it to be delivered OTA.

Release information has to be kept confidential until release. Unless you've got people under an NDA, it's difficult to pass that sort of information on to them and hard to justify for smaller things.

Nokia has informed the council of upcoming things in the past, but they were are all larger scale or more directly relevant to the community.

konttorri has almost always been an invaluable source of information during release days (95% of the information about PR1.0.1 and its specifics came from him the morning of). So perhaps somebody could make a point of interrogation him after a release and stickying that info here.

Of course, this could all be made really, really simple if Nokia could just manage to put together a 3-paragraph announcement about the release with a short overview of the major changes. . . .

this.


We shouldn't have to go out of our way to find out what's going on.

When I first came around these parts, I came across the maemo-announce mailing list and saw it basically empty. So I opened a bug report suggesting it be used or shut down. I just assumed they had started using other methods of providing announcements. But they do *no* announcements.

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6565

It seems clear they should just start using that list again and letting people know what is up. Simple announcements can really make the whole process more sane.

Perhaps voting for that bug will help.

What went through my head was that having been a mod in various places over the years, I know that if I'd woken up on a Monday morning to find my forum had gone bananas over something for which I could have had a few hours warning and hadn't I'd be really, really pissed.

Like it or not, Nokia is using this place as a support forum. I assumed that 12-24 hours warning that they were going to do something that would draw in people needing support would be courteous.

As I say, I recognise the need for confidentiality in these things, but Nokia are supposed to have that sort of relationship with the Council. My feeling at this point is that the maemo.org council members should decide whether they feel that in future they'd like a bit of notice on events like that, and if so negotiate with their Nokia counterparts. And neither side need tell Us the result as it's not our business.