Re: [Usability] Is this a good idea (gnome-schedule related)

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 01:15 -0300, Mariano Su�-Alvarez wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-06-20 at 15:19 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> > [ Template crontab items for a crontab maintenance tool ]

> This is not very usability related...

Okay :)

> gconf does not really sound like a good place into which to put that
> kind information, specially if you are planning on allowing full scripts
> in the command field, as your diskcheck example suggests

Well, not really full scripts. However, full scripts could be a
possibility.

> Why not set up a $sysconfdir/gnome-schedule directory and put files
> there, one per option, which are actual shell scripts, which (this is me
> brainstorming...) when passed the string 'run' as argument will, well,
> run, and when passed the string 'info' emit a (text/xml/pick-your-
> format) description of the task, including your Combostring, the icon,
> the proposed frequency and maybe a full text explanation of what the
> script does. From what I understand, your app will just edit the
> crontab, so it could get all this information from the scripts in
> $sysconfdir/gnome-shell upon initialization (and maybe fam-watch the
> directory for additions, but that sounds a bit too much) You could even
> look in ~/.gnome2/gnome-shell/ for extra user defined scripts, but this
> is doubtful, since the script cannot be arbitrary (unless in the case of
> user scripts you forget about the metadata and show paths, and stock
> information instead of proposed frequency, icon, etc)

It's a good idea and I will keep in in mind in case I implement this
feature.

> Note this would make it almost trivial for distros to add functionality.

Yes, but so does putting in it gconf: there are oneline commandline
gconf editors included with every standard gnome installation.

But this is more an implementation suggestion. The question is: "Is this
a good idea regardless of the implementation details?". So on a
usability perspective: "Should we implement this at all?" or "Does it
make the application more or perhaps less usable?"

The reason why I ask is that I'd prefer not to lose time with "features"
that are not welcomed by the usability-team (thats you guys). This team
is responsible for the acceptation of the GNOME desktop for normal
users. I can imagine the use of this feature. However, as a Unix expert
I'd probably never use this feature myself (but I am not a statistical
average at all either :p).


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
work: Philip dot VanHoof at cronos dot be
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org