Re: [Fwd: Re: New string in gnome-control-center]

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Hi Jody, Sergey, others,

Jody Goldberg <jody@gnome.org> writes:
>
> I'll disagree here.  This is a problem that will bite anyone that
> has been using X for a while.  The most common use case I've seen is
> people that have ctrl and caps lock swapped.  They log into their
> shiney new gnome and _poof_ their long standing changes don't work
> anymore.  They are not necessarilly technical, xkb is quite new and
> not well used.

Ok, so we're talking about non-technical, with installed and loaded
XKB (which is, as you say, fairly new), long-standing users of X and
using xmodmap to modify their keyboard settings, without actually
knowing that (these are all important for the case at hand).

[Not to mention that I've been using XKB to replace my Caps lock key
with Control for some time now; other systems like FreeBSD]

> We didn't fix this before because we were looking for a less brutal
> hack.  That failed and we're stuck with ignoring things.  The user
> must be warned.  This is another situation where I'd rather see an
> untranslated string in front of the user, than no string, or even a
> message to stderr.

What about the those non-technical, XKB equipped, long-standing X
users?  To them, since they might not understand the message, you're
offering a dialog with meaningless crap and two buttons which don't
help either ("Ignore" and "Rename") -- they would both cause the
exact same failure which you want to avoid (except the "silent"
part):

> We can't ship 2.6.0 with a settings daemon that silently ignores a
> user's configuration that has worked for a few years.

So, this dialog seems to me to be *notification* dialog that things
don't work; it doesn't offer a proper solution ("remind me again that
my configuration doesn't work" or "don't remind me again that my
configuration doesn't work"; no option to fix the configuration), and 
non-technical users still won't be able to get their settings back
(IMHO, that's what they would be interested in, and there's no option
to do that in this proposed dialog).

Whether Gnome's settings daemon ignores this all silently or
non-silently (does non-technical user know how to "unload XKB" -- I
don't know how, and I consider myself a technical user -- I would
have to look it up through man pages, configuration files, etc.).

Did I miss anything?  If not, I don't see a single reason to have
this message in a dialog, instead of stderr, since this seems like
attempt to artificially interpolate usage cases.

Cheers,
Danilo