admiting to our flaws

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

The recent rewrite of the Ataxx docs raises a point:

"When the Animation checkbox is selected, the pieces
will visually change when captured. The animation is
different for each tile set. [NOTE: This feature is
really buggy. When the checkbox isn't selected, the
program doesn't work and suffers from a wide variety
of rendering bugs. Should I mention this in the
documentation?]" 
(quote from 
http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/AttaxDocumentation
)

I know that the Style Guide says not to make up for
inadequacies of the software [1], because as I think
Shaun once put it, the user will shout at the screen
"Don't tell me it sucks, FIX IT!"
But... if we gloss over problems and don't acknowledge
them, the user might shout "How can you seriously
think this is the right way to design an interface?"
(I scream this at GIMP every time I use it.)

There is also the matter that GNOME is not produced in
the same way as corporate software. We *want* our
users to become contributors.

Is there a middle ground?
If a certain function or component may be buggy, or a
procedure is tediously complex (adding a way to switch
keyboard layouts when you've just installed new ones,
for example, bug 326138), could we signal this to the
users, and mention (briefly) that GNOME developers are
working on this but could use help?

I'd appreciate your thoughts on this. 
If this is something we think should be done, we could
perhaps devise a short sentence we can use each time
that links to the "contributing to gnome" section of
the user guide.

[1]
http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/fundamentals-3.html
and
http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/usability-non-objectives.html

Joachim


		
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