Re: libgnome: User level

[Seth Aaron Nickell <snickell Stanford EDU>]

> > As I have absolutely no idea how to design a UI for use by anyone except
> > myself, I'm all too happy to ask for help from someone who can, like Calum.
> > 
> 
> My view is that the advanced user level is basically a dumping ground
> for crack-rock settings to avoid flamewars. ;-)
> 
> If we had some way to simply pick the good ideas and delete
> e.g. nearly all the Sawfish or panel options that would be ideal. 
> But I think there would be a lot of complaints if we removed those
> options.

Another possibility is to not remove the settings themselves, but to 
remove the ability to set them from the interface. That way we don't 
distribute the ability to set crack-rock settings as part of the core 
GNOME distribution, but it will be simple to write tools to change 
particular settings. Both MacOS and Windows are significantly more 
configurable than their interfaces make them out to be, but they have not 
chosen to expose esoteric settings.

Microsoft even published a tool called "power toys" that allowed access to 
some of these features. We could have "advanced capplets" or something as 
a part of 5th toe. I actually prefer this to having user levels.

> Michael makes a good point that user level should be global 
for "the > desktop" (users don't consider panel/WM/FM separate apps) but 
> maybe specific to larger apps like Gnumeric.

A very good point... just because you're a GIMP expert doesn't mean you 
know a column from a row in Gnumeric ;-)

-Seth