Re: [Gimp-developer] GIMP useability - choosing linear vs perceptually uniform RGB

[Robert Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>]

On Sat, 02 May 2015 11:21:37 -0300, Gez wrote:
> El sáb, 02-05-2015 a las 06:09 -0400, Elle Stone escribió:
> > > I'd like to see this discussion heading towards a real world list of
> > > examples of real needs for such options that can't be satisfied with
> > > anything else than these toggles.
> >
> > You are presupposing that the devs can foresee every possible use to 
> > which a user might put a given editing operation.
>
> No, I'm saying that users like us should describe real world situations
> where certain options are needed in order to convince developers of the
> necessity of such options.
> "Let me do whatever I want" is not a good argument.

Yes it is, because we don't know every possible use to which someone
will put something.

We've had the same issue come up in Gutenprint.  Gutenprint exposes
just about every internal control option to users, if they want to
play with them.  It allows things that could actually cause _physical_
damage to printers, in particular specifying ink limits so high that
they would completely soak through non-coated paper and would form
large puddles on coated papers that could gum up the print head.

But then it turned out that people wanted to do things with printers
that we had never envisioned: printing T-shirts, and doing chemical
deposition (in one case, literally printing circuits onto paper using
electroconductive inks).  It turned out to be very fortunate for those
users that we had never imposed limits of that kind because "that
isn't something anybody should be doing".

The one concession that we did make was to group options into
different levels of interface complexity, and add an option to the PPD
file generator to generate simplified PPD files with only the basic
options.  But the default is to use the full-featured interface.

Obviously there are resource constraints here; developers can only do
so much, and have to make decisions about what to do that are mutually
exclusive on time constraints alone.  But deliberately leaving
something out of this kind of project because there isn't an obvious
real world use case is not, in my view, a good thing.
-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk alum mit edu>

***  MIT Engineers   A Proud Tradition   http://mitathletics.com  ***
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