Re: Objections [Was: GNOME System Monitor will use libgnomesu]

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 18:47:31 +0000, Mike Hearn <mike navi cx> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:23:34 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote:
> > To me, your argument roughly translates as "Distro A has different
> > customizations than Distro B.  Gnome programs should give warning
> > dialogs that confuse most users because it allows sysadmin-types to
> > have a slightly easier time undoing those customizations".  While
> > assisting sysadmins is a good goal, I think that this isn't the
> > appropriate way to do so.  I feel that the help documentation or
> > release notes would be much better.
> 
> Like I said I was arguing the general case rather than specifically for
> procman. 3rd party applications should always delay-link to optional
> dependencies, this just makes things so much easier for users. GNOME is
> usually shipped with distributions and is expected to be bundled up as a
> cohesive whole so it's less useful there.
> 
> But I didn't want Jeffs comment to be taken as "apps should prefer compile
> time options to runtime checks", because I think that's harmful to
> usability.

Your orignal email had arguments about two things (or at least so it
appeared)--compile time versus link time checks and whether to throw a
warning message if libraries/apps aren't found.  I only meant to argue
against the idea of showing a warning message; sorry if that wasn't
clear.

Cheers,
Elijah