Re: Warts, Features and Icebergs [Was: Request for breakage in gnome-panel]

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Comments Below!

On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 12:57 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
><quote who="Jeff Waugh">
>> Minor comment, I don't necessarily disagree: We are going to get flamed
>> for this change. Particularly since there's no way to customize the menus
>> (and I don't mean "menu editing", more like toolbar/menu editors in office
>> apps).
>
>I don't think removing the 'Run Application...' item is freeze break worthy.
>If it were important enough, it could have been dealt with months ago. This
>is a micro-incremental change, mostly to satisfy our rarefied sensibilities,
>not give real value to our users. I mean *real* value. We're taking away one
>lonely menu item, which perhaps looks ugly, which in turn, takes away one
>function our users have had since before GNOME even had pubic hair.
>
>In all honesty, I'm not opposed to seeing this go. But why frig around with
>a dying model at all, let alone after freeze? Let's keep the feature, call
>it a wart, and leave it alone until we fix the model. It's doing no harm. We
>have stuff in GNOME that punches users in the face daily - let's fix a few
>of those!

Originally I worked with the new menu design when I saw it coming into
upstream because I thought we could get some nice improvements.  I did a
lot of bug organizing for it and spent some time getting a tracker and
trying to get some sanity into the menu situation according to bugzilla.
After it was put into CVS I didn't check up on it too much because I had
other things to do and having "the perfect menu" isn't that important.
Within the past couple weeks Fedora has fully caught up with upstream
versions and I had a look at what was done.  I filed a bug against the
menu because I had expressed a dislike for the Run Applications before
but there was a miscommunication, Vincent was nice enough to get a patch
in quickly to fix this.

So removing this isn't a major deal, I think I expressed this in my
request.  I did try to get it removed months ago and it didn't happen,
whatever.  However it is ugly.  Really ugly.  It's not just a wart, but
a wart on the tip of our nose the size of our eye.  And it's not as
though I'm asking that all hands attend to this situation either.  A
patch already exists for this fix.  

So what if we are flamed for removing this?  If it's the right thing to
do, isn't that worth getting flamed for? ;-)

Even if the 'Run Applications' has been around since the beginning of
GNOME, that doesn't mean it's a good thing.  If we keep with that
mentality we'll never be able to make any progress, we wouldn't have
been able to remove the old menu.

This is a trivial thing.  It's one menu item.  It happens to take it's
place somewhere I think most people agree it shouldn't.  What I'm asking
is will it hurt translation, docs, and other teams enough that this
isn't worth slipping in late.  

Also, I don't want to think of all the children who will cry when they
see the Run Applications item in the top level menu.  Do you want to
make those children cry?  Do you?

Nope,
~ Bryan