Re: Feature and string break request

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 12:24 +0200, Lucas Rocha wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 2008/3/17, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>:
> > Le lundi 17 mars 2008, à 09:57 +0100, Alexander Larsson a écrit :
> >
> > Looks like I didn't emphasizes enough the "in some part" part of my
> >  sentence :-) It doesn't completely deprecate file-roller, sure, but it
> >  deprecates it for quite some use cases. It could totally replace
> >  file-roller in my personal case, eg.
> >
> >  What do other release team members think?
> 
> I'm more concerned about the usability part of this addition. I'm sure
> if "mounting an archive" is an intuitive metaphor for the users.

Not that Apple are gods or whatever, but this is what OSX does with e.g.
DMG files. It also maps to what you do with other kinds of things like
network mounts, so the mount concept is not entierly new to users (even
if the mounts are not normally loopback mounts, and loopback is a bit
"meta").

I don't think mounting an archive is something a user who have never
seen this before would think of as a possible operation, but once you've
used this feature one time I don't think its particularly hard to
understand (and if you never find this feature that is not a great
problem). However, I don't think there is a better alternative approach.
The only one I can think of is to pretend archives are directories, and
that is fraught with confusion about what is a directory and what is a
file both in the implementation and in the user interface, as well as
lifetime cycle problems.

I'd classify this as a very useful feature for some class of users, and
not very interesting for others. For the second class just make file
roller the default action for archives, and this will never ever show up
to these users unless they look for it. If they do they can then easily
change the default handler for the archive types if they are interested
in often using this feature.