Re: GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.0: "Mighty Atom"

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 03:19:07AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: 
> >   zenity - Provides graphical prompts and dialogues in shell scripts.
> 
> I think that this is of little practical use to the 'greatest common factor'
> of GNOME Desktop users. Admins and advanced users can install it if they
> want it - a great candidate for geektoys or an admin tools release...
> 

I don't think zenity is a "geek" feature really, it's more of an admin
feature.

If Seth would post the personas stuff he has (he wanted to wait to
discuss personas until he posted his stuff), I think we would see that
the target audience has a user persona(s), but also an admin persona.

That is, we should think of GNOME as having at least two distinct
interfaces; an end user interface, and an administration interface.

Stuff in the administration interface may be more technical in nature,
but that's because it needs to be to perform the task in question.

In short, "administrative" is not the same as "geektoys" - geektoys
are things an administrator qua computer geek might use on their own
desktop, but they would not be using it in their role as
administrator, they'd be using it in their role as a geeky user.

zenity on the other hand would be deployed to all the user desktops, 
and used for one-off site-local dialogs of various kinds.

Havoc