Re: control-center 2.13.90 released

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2006-02-09 at 22:25 +1300, Glynn Foster wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 16:10 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > On 2/6/06, Elijah Newren <newren gmail com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Was there a reason to do that instead of using Glynn's patch from bug
> > > 327335 to revert this specific change?
> > 
> > 1) I was not aware of that bug and patch
> > 2) We also want the icons back
> 
> So what's the situation of this - are the various patches going to be
> reverted? It seems like there's a *strong* disagreement for these
> changes by many people in this thread that these changes. 
> 
> It seems to me that from a corporate point of view, there's 2 vendors,
> Red Hat and Sun, have already reverted these changes and shipping a
> different version of the capplet.

Which, on top of everything else, makes it damn near
impossible to write good upstream documentation for
this capplet.  Our policy is that we always describe
stock upstream Gnome.  When vendor versions of Gnome
are different, upstream documentation is incorrect.
And vendors aren't usually in the habit of checking
the documentation against their patches.

Here's where somebody sends a reply saying that it's
a vendor problem, and it's their responsibility to
make sure they ship documentation consistent with
their Gnome.  So here's where I reply that, by and
large, vendors don't, and it's actually not all that
easy to do so.  And when the documentation is wrong,
guess who that reflects poorly on?  That's right,
our documentation team.  And we just further train
users that the documentation is useless, making them
less likely to look at the documentation even when
it is correct and complete.

Explicit apply needs to be explicitly documented,
because it is a deviation from the norm.  I don't,
on the other hand, feel the need to ramble on about
instant apply in every dialog's help.  So we'll have
this help page that will say "You must click Apply
to use the settings you've selected."  And then the
user will look at the Close button and conclude that
we're off our rockers.

--
Shaun