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

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Havoc,

On Sat, 2002-01-05 at 18:41, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Please do, I'd love to take credit for doing the Right Thing. ;-)

	Great :-) I have no problem with loosing User Levels per-se, and no
problem with hiding some configuration settings inside GConf; but ...

> 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.

	I just want to register my serious concerns that options provide a way
for more than 1 person to work on a project without serious
disagreement, that is without overt fascism [cf. Metacity ].

	I really, really don't want to see Gnome go down the Metacity route of
no options whatsoever [hearsay is that correct ?] perhaps 1 mouse
sensitivity, 1 focus style ...  the approach seems to have no merit, and
social problems.

> 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.

	Sometimes 'fixing' such things is a very individual thing, is it worth
creating the mass flamage ? I'm personally in favour of an option as to
whether to include a 'Close' button in whatever dialog - if it helps
someone - it's pretty harmless - and might save hours of fruitless
opinionated discussion.

> 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.

	IMHO things should stay configurable in any way people want to
configure them; and most certainly hard limits / behavior should not be
coded back into an application where they had been painstakingly removed
previously.
 
	Finally some settings are not appropriate for display in a generic
GConf tool, such as enumerations, and some settings interlock in a
relatively complex fashion, that mandates more careful treatment -
unless one wants a horribly confusing auto-generated dialog with
conflicting options, some of which are invalid at any given time, the
program receiving invalid states or excessive validation of the state.

> 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.

	Fine - both threads were initiated by you.

	All I want is a gentle assurance that this isn't the start of a 1 man
crusade to rid the world of the majority of the options that people have
coded for their use, removing code, and replacing it with someone's
hard-coded idea of what is best. I'm particularly concerned about any
options I personally use :-) And of course, I have no problem with
removing the user-level, or the idea that a few appropriately obscure
options should be shoved into a gconf-tool type access. 

	Hmm,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot