Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Adam Dingle <adam yorba org> wrote:
> I realized recently to my surprise and dismay that the compact view has been
> removed from Nautilus:

Adam, if you wanted to discuss this change, you could have done so on
the bug or on the Nautilus mailing list, or by asking on
#gnome-design. I would have been happy to have given you some
background on why the decision was made.

Jon has been doing some fantastic work on Nautilus recently. It was
getting very little - if any - developer attention and he has stepped
up to make dramatic improvements, including addressing long-standing
complaints. I'm really excited about the next release of Nautilus
thanks to his work; instead of having no movement whatsoever, we are
going to have lots of great improvements to talk about.

There has been a bunch of discussion around these changes. Not the
mailing list approach that you seem to want, but the existing Nautilus
maintainers have been involved and a range of design people have been
consulted. I personally agreed with removing compact view - I think
it's a good change.

...
> I'd like to end on a constructive note.  I propose that GNOME adopt the
> following policy.  No major feature will be removed from a core GNOME
> application before a discussion has occurred on a public mailing list such
> as this one (or on a Bugzilla bug, with a prominent mailing list
> announcement pointing to the bug in question).  I also propose that all such
> feature removals that have occurred in the 3.6 development cycle be reverted
> until such discussion has occured .

I strongly disagree with that suggestion. I don't think it would be
workable, and I don't think it would make GNOME a better place to
work. There is still time to discuss changes that have been made; we
don't need to wrap ourselves up in policies.

> The features in core GNOME apps are the result of years of hard work and
> consensus building by our community.
...

There is no consensus. There are features that some people have gotten
used to, and there has been a long period of adding features without
considering how they fit into the whole.

No one objects when you add a feature, yet features can ruin a design
if you keep adding them. Nautilus has been at saturation point for a
while; it's at the stage where it's actually very difficult to improve
it without taking something away.

Allan
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