Re: [Nautilus-list] Mounting preferences - the death of options.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Michael Meeks <michael ximian com> writes: 
> 	I personally would blame it on you :-)
>

Please do, I'd love to take credit for doing the Right Thing. ;-)

> > It's the strong opinion of most of "core gnome hackers"
> 
> 	Who said that ? did you do a straw poll on this; or ... perhaps I was
> asleep somewhere.

It's the impression I have. Panel and control center are clearly
moving in this direction, for example. We're on track to have 10
capplets instead of whatever crazy number we have now, and they are
mostly simplified too.
 
> 	And they remain a good solution to encouraging our user base; I've had
> people walk up to me at trade shows and say "I don't use Gnome because
> ..." and I've shown them the option, and they go away happy.

It would have been better if they never needed the option. In my
experience these conversations are normally because the default is
broken and they need to fix it before proceeding.

When it's really just a preference and is useful to change, then
great, we'll have that preference. I understand that lots of the
appeal of the panel is configurability, and so it should remain
configurable in cool ways. Just not in useless ways.

This is just common sense.

> 	Shall we determine where this crusade to reduce user choice is going
> before going too much further ? I was totally unaware of the plan  to
> remove the user level until it seemed to be a done deal - I was under
> the impression that this was something that we would be using more
> ubiquitously, rather than axing altogether - what is going on ?

See these two threads:

 http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2001-November/msg00115.html
 http://lists.eazel.com/pipermail/nautilus-list/2001-December/006543.html

See gconf-editor module in CVS, too.

Havoc