Re: Pleasantness [was: Re: Sound effects]

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Fri, 12.12.08 17:43, Dave Neary (dneary gnome org) wrote:

> Iain wonders why there are 125 user-configurable system sounds in GNOME.
> He sees that most of the sounds are application-specific, not
> system-general, and suggests doing away with most of them, and letting
> applications handle application-specific sounds, and having the system
> configuration only be used for system-level sounds.

I am sorry: As already pointed out in a personal email to you: this is
not the correct premise. We don't expose 125 user-configurable system
sounds in GNOME. We never did. It's about 16 or so. 

Also, stuff like input feedback sounds have their own checkbox you can
easily disable them with at once.

I mentioned both of these facts during the thread.

> This is a perfectly reasonable starting principle. And for a while there
> was lively, useful discussion.
> 
> Lennart didn't respond to that argument by responding to the principle,
> and explaining the reasoning behind theming in the first place, he
> started arguing against the details of the proposal of Iain.

He. Why should I respond to that on principle? I have nothing against
the idea of having a minimal sound theme consisting of a single sound
only. The technology for defining such a theme is already there. It's
just a matter of putting it together and getting it into the
distributions.

You know, it would probably even make sense to ship such a theme
within the s-t-fdo tarball since it is very generic. (Before we do
that we however need to check how much this overlaps with the
checkboxes we already provide)

What I was responding to is the premises and conclusions. Because most
of them were invalid and incorrect.

(Also note that I still havent' entirely understood what exactly iaian
was asking for which makes it impossible to respond "to a principle".)

> This entire discussion has been symptomatic of a malaise in GNOME
> discussion lists, where obstreperousness has consistently put an end to
> interesting debate and turned it into flamewars. The project is better
> served by people arguing principles than attacking either the messenger
> or the grammar of the message.

Not so sure that this thread is really a good example for your
case. My response was solely based on technical reasoning. Maybe it
appeared a bit aggressive or unfriendly. But in the end technical
reasoning is what matters.

Lennart