Re: string change, may we die a death of a thousand swords

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

murrayc@t-online.de (Murray Cumming) writes:

> On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 08:33, Seth Nickell wrote:
> > Hi. jrb and I would like to make a string change. One of the themes is
> > currently named "Default", and this needs to change. The best name we
> > can find for the theme is "Simple", but this is confusing compared to
> > "Plain". Thus we'd like to rename "Default" to "Simple" and "Plain" to
> > "Traditional".
> 
> Could you tell us why? I suspect your  big "default background" thread
> has something to do with it, but it's not particularly clear.

Shipping a theme called 'Default' is bad.  It's rough on all packagers
(redhat, mandrake, presumably sun, etc) that want to change the default
to be somethings else.  They have to either:

1) rename default
2) remove default
3) explain to their users that the theme named 'default' isn't the
   default

Also, if we want to change the theme later, it is kind of bad.  Consider
this conversation:
"Hey! nice theme.  What's it called?"
"I'm just running Default"
"My default doesn't look like that?  How do you get your default to look
like that?"
"Dunno.  It's just the default"
etc.

Finally, it's not very descriptive.  All the other themes are at least
roughly evocative of what they show.  Default is not.

-Jonathan