Re: Arlo, a little QA comment regarding your interview withlinux.com

[Kevin Cullis <kevincu orci com>]

Alan Shutko wrote:
> 
> John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com> writes:
> 
> > On the other hand, in theory anyway, hidden files are hidden for a reason --
> > they aren't intended for users to futz with.
> 
> Not always.  They may be hidden because you don't always want to see
> them cluttering up your ~ file listing, but are definately intended to
> be user-modified or user-viewed.  Many of my dotfiles come under that
> heading:
> -rw-r--r--    1 ats      ats           642 Oct 13 15:22 .profile
> -rw-r--r--    1 ats      ats            67 Jun  9 09:33 .project
> -rw-rw-r--    1 ats      ats         24929 Jul 18 23:26 .rpmfind
> -rw-rw-r--    1 ats      ats            92 Oct  7 19:20 .sawfishrc
> -rw-r--r--    1 ats      ats          3394 Jul 10 17:26 .screenrc
> drwx------    2 ats      ats          4096 Oct 17 23:51 .ssh
> drwx------    3 ats      ats          4096 Jul 29 15:04 .ssh2
> -rw-------    1 ats      ats          2093 Oct 25 11:10 .xsession-errors
> 
> Furthermore, this is a choice that is very dependant on what I want to
> do.  Normally, I don't want to wade through 136 dot entries in my home
> directory, but when I do, I want to do so for this instance, and I
> don't want to have to change global settings to do it.

Exactly my point!!

> 
> This is the same thing as certain settings in Netscape.  I may want to
> browse with java and javascript off, but turn it on for this page.  Or
> I may want to override the font size for a single page because of the
> horrifying mess that web font use is.  (For this, Netscape does have
> menu items, but I've never managed to make them work.)
> 
> > Also, every menu item adds a little bit of complexity to the
> > menus. If the program has 200 menu items, it is much harder to deal
> > with than a program with 50 menu items.
> 
> That's very true.  Which is why it's nice that with MS Office,
> WordPerfect, and other older apps, you can change the menus to
> incorporate commands that you use and need.  It's not something that
> every user uses, but those who do (like my wife) use it a _lot_.  This
> is an important feature, but not normally implemented because it's
> harder for the programmer.  The gnome-libs should, imho, provide the
> infrastructure to make this easier.  (Ditto keybindings and toolbar
> customization.)
> 
> But what about the increased support costs?  Who cares?  You clearly
> have to make a compromise between support costs and increasing
> people's productivity.  After all, support costs would be less if we
> didn't have preferences at all and instead hard-coded behavior.
> 

The issue is solving people's problems.  Iterative progression keeps
things in line with expectations.  Being effective means getting the job
done, being efficient means doing it at the least amount of time and
effort. The sad part is that people try to be efficient first without
being effective (i.e.cheap).  That's not to say that version 1 of a
program is bad.

Kevin

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