Re: GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.1.4: "We don't need... roads."

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Thu, 2002-12-12 at 12:43, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > Makes me wonder though, why usability bugs can't be release blockers. Or
> > can they?
> 
> They haven't been so far, unless "horrifically dangerous to users" could be
> regarded as a usability bug. Without enough people writing the patches, and
> the pace of our releases at the moment, we're simply not in a position to
> impose that on our process or hackers.

I generally agree with this, but it's a policy to be careful about,
otherwise we'll end up with a once-pretty desktop with tons of unusable
new features. I fear greatly that the font capplet will never be made
usable/not ugly as sin until someone puts their foot down and screams a
lot, threatening (even) to hold up a release for it, and I fear the same
kind of un-usability creep will happen elsewhere as well. [Note, for
example, how quickly we all tolerated file-roller since it is better
than what we have.]

Additionally, serious usability regressions in core functionality will
be considered showstoppers- either to be backed out or fixed. I
certainly have no problem with doing such a thing if I see it. 

[FWIW, such a thing may have creeped into the mime-type machinery- I see
no way in the current UI to actually set a mime-type handler, and I fear
it is related to UI cleanups at some point post-2.0.0. There is much
brokeness in the theme capplet as well; it is (IMHO) inherently more
difficult to use and less obvious than the old machinery.]

Luis (yes, I know I need to post a bug summary... sorry it has been so
long in coming :/