Re: Shares interface

[Anna Dirks <anna ximian com>]

Hi Hans Petter, 

Thanks for your mail. Let's see if I can answer your questions.

On 21 Mar 2001 00:02:11 -0600, Hans Petter Jansson wrote:
> So I'm on my way to reimplementing the shares-admin interface, based on your
> mockup, and I have two questions:
> 
> In the imports table, host and path are separate columns. It will look like
> this (some columns skipped):
> 
> Host    Path          Mount Point
> ----    ----          -----------
> 
> roger   /victor       /mnt/vector
> sloth   /public
> sloth   /ximian
> wrath   /public
> wrath   /secret       /mnt/wrong-hands
> 
> With the old interface, the host/path column was a tree (lots of columns
> skipped):
> 
> Location    Mount Point
> --------    -----------
> 
> roger
> `- /victor  /mnt/vector
> 
> sloth
> +- /public
> `- /ximian
> 
> wrath
> +- /public
> `- /secret  /mnt/wrong-hands
> 
> Q1: Do you strongly prefer the first approach?
> 

A1:  I prefer it, I don't know about strongly. My reasoning in designing
it this way was: 

The learning curve for the tool will be lowest (ie, the tool will be
easiest for people
to learn to use) if the manner in which information is requested in the
add/settings dialog
is reflected in the main window. Since we ask the user for host and path
separately, I
thought it made sense to display them separately. Further, from a
readability stand point,
I think that it is easiest to visually associate the "mounted" and
"mount point" information
with the proper host/path if all the information about the import is on
the same line.                  
This could be just me. 

I read through the Macintosh Human Interface Guidlines, to see if I
could find
any info about this, and came up with nothing. 

If you feel strongly that the tree view is best, then implement it that
way. I trust that
you know how experienced haXors conceive of shares. The tree view does
seem 
better from a seeing-which-imports-are-from-the-same-machine stand
point. 

> 
> In the exports table, "clients" is a column in the list.
> 
> Name    Path           Clients         Writable
> ----    ----           -------         --------
> public  /store/public  10.0.0.1, 10.>  [X]
> secret  /store/secret  10.0.0.2, 10.>  [ ]
> 
> Q2: Is this practical when an export can have several clients/client
> patterns?
> 
> The closest parallel I could find is the network-admin statichosts table,
> which has a (wide) aliases column where the aliases are space-separated, and
> another table below, which holds the alias entries of the currently selected
> entry in the upper table.


A2: Okay, I think you are right about this. I checked in an alternative
version of the mockup;
look at alt_shares_mockup.glade Let me know if this you think this works
better. I'm not wildly 
taken with my solution (wasn't sure of what to name the frame or the
button, wasn't sure which
widget to use to list the clients), but it was the best I could do off
of the top of my head. I'll keep thinking about it. I am a little
hesitant to adopt the network-admin style, as it is only used in that
one place in the xst; i think that a frame-containing-extra-info design
would be more in line with the other tools.


I await your reply.
cheerio,
Anna