Re: [Gimp-developer] Bring back normal handling of other file formats

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 12:04 AM, Jay Smith wrote:

>  In fact, in my observation of open source conversations over the years,
> including occasionally in the past by only one or two people that were on
> this list, there has been a general attitude on the part of a few
> individuals that "ordinary users" are morons and should be ignored.

This discussion won't move us forward if some vocal people keep
assuming that developers treat users as morons. I've heard this
argument over and over again with regards to people who would never
think such a thing. Could you please accept this as a fact and move
on?

> People seem to learn best from adversity.  If you corrupt your own image
> file and did not make a pre-editing backup copy, you just might learn
> something.  However, if that same user is "protected" from doing something
> stupid, then the user will learn nothing.

Do you think you could ever get used to the idea that there's more
than one way to teach people safety? :)

> progressively even more ignorant.  If users choose not to read warnings or
> don't take the time to think about and comprehend the meaning of warnings,
> then maybe the users deserve the spanking that they will receive as a result
> of their own action / inaction.  Or is spanking illegal now too?

Dude, there's such a heap of lacking understanding in your case that I
don't even know where to begin explaining. But let me try.

People don't choose not reading stuff per se. They do this subconciosly.

As an example, most recent eye-tracking studies show that users tend
to avoid even looking at sidebars where adsense adverts typically are.
They don't tell themselves: "Don't look! Don't look!", they just
eventually stop looking there.

This is more or less what happens with warning dialogs. They are
annoying, so people subcionciously learn to avoid paying attention to
them.

> What's wrong with the Libre Office method: Open a non-ODX file, make a
> change, do a Save, get a dialog box that asks if you want to save in the old
> format (and lose any non-compatible changes) or in ODX format?  The 'old
> format' button is already highlighted, so the user just has to hit the Enter
> key.  Why is that approach so terrible?  It seems to be okay for those
> (perhaps millions???) of users?  And certainly users of word processing
> programs may possibly be less sophisticated than users of powerful image
> creation/editing software.

This has been discussed a thousand times before. It's why Peter wrote
this page: http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/Vision_briefing

I'm sorry, but even after reading that page you don't understand why
the LibreOffice method doesn't work for GIMP, I'm going to have to
assume that you are trying to annoyingly brute-force reverting the
change. This is not going to work.

There's just one more thing. I'd like to introduce you to the concept
of responsibility. Simply put, we are answerable for design decisions
we make.

Whatever we do, it's us who are either praised or hated. People who
try to talk us into something go away sooner or later, but _we_ stay.

You are basically telling us that our design decision is wrong even
though we haven't even finished all of the work. If hell freezes, and
we revert the change, _you_ won't be around to deal with annoyed
target audience. _You_ won't have to deal with users on daily basis.
_You_ won't take responsibility.

And that is precisely the reason why the team never blindly does
everything it's told.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org