Re: We want task bar back. Pretty please.

[Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk redhat com>]

On Thu, 2011-05-05 at 10:48 -0700, Micah Carrick wrote:
> I'll give you a quick answer to that...

> When we first switch to GNOME 3, many of us did not realize we were
> not upgrading, but switching to a completely new beast.

This is ...interesting. Perhaps in new release of busybox I'll switch
dd from "if=FILE of=FILE" syntax to "-i FILE -o FILE" one.
And of course, I will make sure old way doesn't work.

I bet my users would *love* that. This new syntax is more consistent,
more UNIX-like, etc... And stupid old-hatters can go screw themselves.
Right?

> So we do a few Google searches and we find a much larger percentage of
> un-resolved complaints and the same ones over and over. It gives the
> impression the the core team has not answered (which of course is not
> the case) or does not care about what *we* think (we being the
> existing user-base and "power users"). It can be difficult to navigate
> through the GNOME Wiki.
> 
> The point I am making is that while this list has answered some of
> these same questions and complaints over and over and over--the
> unanswered posts and blogs seem to drown out the answers. There is a
> lot of information to sort through.

Yes, when you get many complaints about something, one possibility is
bad or misplaced documentation. Another possibility is that they do see
a problem which is not apparent to the developer.

Example:

Recently, one user complained that DHCP client I maintain sends packets
with "secs" field set to 0.

I read the RFC and it basically says that the rationale behind this
field proved to be dubious and this field can be set to 0.
So I told the user that this is not a bug, and in order to keep things
simpler, I'm going to leave it as-is.

Then a month later another user again complained about the same thing.

This rang a bell for me. "Something is fishy here. One pedantic idiot
insisting on filling up this field is imaginable, but two?"
I asked for details. BINGO! It _is_ a real problem, because Mac OS
has an idiotic DHCP server which can be configured to answer only
to the packets with "secs" >= CONFIGURABLE_NUMBER,
and worse, by default this CONFIGURABLE_NUMBER is not 0, but 2!!!
Thus, my DHCP client never works when DHCP server runs on Mac OS!


>  I think some more work can be done on FAQ and that the marketing
> could do more to reach out to existing GNOME user-base. 

I don't see how improving docs will allow me to find or open IRC
window in tho operations: "look at the screen bottom... click there,
or click icon in the top bar". It simply doesn't work anymore.
For some unfathomable reason, app icons in the top bar are nuked too.
Moreover, the space where they sat IS NOT REUSED FOR ANYTHING,
it is just empty now. I don't get it. Why??

-- 
vda