Donnie Berkholz ([info]spyderous) wrote,
@ 2008-02-18 23:42:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Entry tags:communication, development, gentoo, leadership

What are the top 3 issues facing Gentoo?
I ran a quick, informal poll on the internal Gentoo developers' list last week, and tonight I began analyzing the results. 50 developers responded to my 9-question survey, and I'm going to post the results of 1 question at a time.

First question: What are the top 3 issues facing Gentoo?

Pie chart

Technical issues are way down on the list. Developers' top 5 issues are manpower, publicity, goals, developer friction, and leadership. It's good to see that we've been addressing at least a couple of them with the newly energized public relations project and work on the Code of Conduct. Other issues that have been ongoing for quite a while now are the lack of distro-wide vision and goals. The Council could provide those by increased activity and taking stronger stands in particular directions, and that's part of the reason I did this survey—to figure out which directions our developers care about. I think part of the problem is that nobody sits around pondering directions and ideas. Everybody's busy working in their own little areas and not thinking about the big picture. Manpower, or lack of it, is another issue I'm indirectly addressing in my push for greatness, which I'm going to post more about at some point (I promise!).

To create this chart, I used Google's excellent chart API. The neat part about the API is that it's simply a URL, so you can construct it with any language. I used a shell script since I was already fiddling around with awk. Any answer with less than 4 respondants was grouped into Other to make the rest of the chart readable.


(Post a new comment)

Others
[info]coldwind.myopenid.com
2008-02-19 12:36 pm UTC (link)
A short summary of the composition of "Others" would be nice.

And thanks for your efforts with the poll ;-)

(Reply to this)(Thread)
Re: Others
(Anonymous)
2008-02-19 01:12 pm UTC (link)
Very nice work! :)

But! the horrors of pie charts! - and in 3d. Google chart api might be nice - but that pie chart breaks all rules of charting :(.

1) remove 3d it skews/lies about the value. The "area" a slice covers should equal the actual data value.
2) pie charts are hard to read with >3 items

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Others
(Anonymous)
2008-02-19 03:25 pm UTC (link)
and 4.9 percent at grounds of fity-some samples is somewhat about ... 4 time issued... why not use absolute counts? and trim it down to things issued more than 5 times, and you have a nice^H^H^H^Hbetter chart...

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Others
[info]spyderous
2008-02-19 04:22 pm UTC (link)
It's actually more like 150 samples, since each of 50 developers listed 3.

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Re: Others
[info]spyderous
2008-02-19 04:23 pm UTC (link)
1) It does. People look at the world in 3D all the time, and if you account for perspective like you do everywhere else, it's accurate.

2) Yes, I know. I'm thinking of making a more generalized one that just shows the areas of problems; there are about 5.

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Re: Others
(Anonymous)
2008-02-20 07:13 pm UTC (link)
And what about colors -- dark piece looks smaller than a light colored one ;) Should be all the peaces of the same color?

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Noooooo!!!! Please not more of those damn pies.
(Anonymous)
2008-02-19 03:54 pm UTC (link)
Donnie,

please please read http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/save_the_pies_for_dessert.pdf

regards,
nixnut

(Reply to this)(Thread)
Re: Noooooo!!!! Please not more of those damn pies.
[info]spyderous
2008-02-19 04:39 pm UTC (link)
I got about 3/4 of the way through that and he finally started talking about real evidence rather than his subjective opinion. I'll have to fiddle around with my script to do a bar graph because data and axis labels are specified differently.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Noooooo!!!! Please not more of those damn pies.
(Anonymous)
2008-02-19 06:39 pm UTC (link)
Oh, ehm, well, I guessed you would have seen the light after the examples on page two and three.

If you only accept things backed up by scientific publications look for stuff from Bertin, Kosslyn, and Cleveland for starters. Few is a man with strong opinions, but I haven't seen him preach anything yet that wasn't firmly based in scientific findings.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Noooooo!!!! Please not more of those damn pies.
[info]spyderous
2008-02-19 07:00 pm UTC (link)
I don't require scientific publications, but I do require actual evidence from usability studies etc rather than some guy going on about how he personally thinks something is unusable. That's why I was happy to see some later on.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Noooooo!!!! Please not more of those damn pies.
(Anonymous)
2008-02-19 07:20 pm UTC (link)
I don't know how interested you are in info-viz... but Colin Ware's 'Information Visualization' has a great deal of information on the subject from a scientific point of view. Few's books are more for people that just want to know what the principles of good information visualization are and how to apply them. As such his books don't go as deeply into the research behind the principles.

regards,
nixnut

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Re: Noooooo!!!! Please not more of those damn pies.
(Anonymous)
2008-02-20 02:43 am UTC (link)
Classic. We're talking about the devs' issues with Gentoo--which are easily enough demonstrated to me in the pie chart--and yer man is being hammered for not doing things along the exact lines of some academic theories of usability.

Is bitchin' about nonsense instead of providing helpful leadership not the main point of Gentoo's current instability?

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Noooooo!!!! Please not more of those damn pies.
(Anonymous)
2008-02-22 09:43 am UTC (link)
Have to agree 100% with the parent.

Also, I think the chart is fine.

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Relying on the Council is a good thought...
[info]linuxtidbits.wordpress.com
2008-02-20 06:37 am UTC (link)
The Council has crumbled before so while this seems it's place, one person alone did the work the last year that involved licking adhesive. > #2 = >#5

(Reply to this)
This is actually good news
(Anonymous)
2008-02-20 04:35 pm UTC (link)
the fact that no no one can really agree that there's a huge problem indicates that maybe gentoo has no big problems. Manpower is a given. There's never enough developers.

I'm new to the distro and built my first Gentoo box last week. I had some pretty obscure issues and was able to solve them all with documentation, their forums, the wiki. I didn't need to do a single "help I can't find info on this!" post because it's all there.

In fact I made a post about my experience saying how great everything gentoo really is. I mean it too 8) Walking into this distro was like finally coming home. I have a stable 64 bit system. I play games and cvs wine is functioning properly with none of the glitchy problems that the cedega users report.

I can't do this nearly as easily with other distros. I'm sure it's intimidating with new linux users but for someone with some experience with gnu linux will find it quite refreshing after dealing with package distros.

-Viz

(Reply to this)(Thread)
Re: This is actually good news
(Anonymous)
2008-02-25 11:01 pm UTC (link)
Ditto; it is like coming home. What I did with Gentoo could not have been done (I know, I tried) as easily with other distros. The key observation is that the info really is all there, one need only look. Documentation, forums, wiki together have met my every need till now.

very satisfied, fifty-something, amateur, Gentoo PPC and x86 user

(Reply to this)(Parent)

Create an Account
Forgot your login?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…