Re: [Nautilus-list] What silly preferences do we actually use (Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Thomas Cataldo <thomas cataldo laposte net> writes: 
> > I totally understand that people don't want to learn anything new. At
> > the same time, it really really hoses up the UI if an app is
> > essentially 10 apps in one. It also makes implementation and QA a
> > total nightmare.
> 
> Isn't it why a component model and gconf was added ? I watch html with
> an html browser/component. This browser is just an implementation of
> HtmlBrowser corba interface. I'd like to set HtmlBrowser settings in the
> control center, and I have every html compoment implementing HtmlBrowser
> to reuse my settings.

That's not really what makes the implementation harder (it's easy to
implement getting/setting a preference). The reason QA/implementation
is harder is that you have many more code paths and possible
configuration combinations to worry about. This also makes UI design
and interoperability much harder problems, often.
 
> imho, the real problem is not 'what is a preference', but how many time
> do i have to setup the same thing to have a consistent look & feel.
> 
> For exemple, emacs keybindings on text entries is configurable for
> gtkhtml, nautilus, and probably in some other places... It should be a
> gtk option. The default value could be discovered from my shell
> settings, because emacs keybindings are a shell setting.
> 
> Of course this point has been discussed a lot for fonts, proxy settings
> (i've got $http_proxy in my shell and only console applications seems
> clever enough to use it), smtp server. But developpers keep on adding
> preferences for things that allready are customizable at a lower level
> (e.g. why do I have text near my icons in evolution whereas my setting
> in the control center is 'icons have no text').

I'd generally agree, but it's a separate problem from which prefs we
should have...

Havoc