[OT] Re: [Usability] Re: Default Save Location and Default Save Filetype in UI config

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2005, Joachim Noreiko wrote:

> Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2005 17:51:48 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Cc: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Re: Default Save Location and Default Save
>     Filetype in UI config
>
>
> --- Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie> wrote:
> > "The perfect is the enemy of the good"

The inkscape developers learned me good ;P

I'm a born critic but I think I've learned my lesson and am now make a
bigger effort to be pragmatic.  It was a lesson I learnt by making the
mistake over and over again until someone was wise enough and helpful
enough to educate me.

It seems to be a fundamental part of the Open Source ethic to commit
something that works (making some effort to avoid unmaintainable hacks of
course as they might result in more work in the long run) and then
gradually improving it later.

It is more important to give something which basically works, and it hell
of a lot better than nothing, some imaginary future perfect
implementation.*

Software development is evolutionary not revolutionary.

> How true!
> There are a lot of bugs, not just in GNOME, whose
> bugzilla comments say 'will deal with this once we've
> upgraded to fancy library Foo', often for quite
> minor-seeming problems, but ones which are an ongoing
> irritation to users.

There are lots of bugs which are very speculative (I like making requests
I do) and developers cannot do everything but there are certainly cases
where we could all be a bit more pragmatic.

I cannot help thinking of the comments Linus made recently.  Although
Gnome does try very hard to get the defaults right it can be quite
annoying if you dont like the defaults.  Hopefully in future we can do
more to make the ordinary tasks easy and at least make the difficult tasks
possible (without resorting to the command line).

Apologies in advance if I've set off the cliche alarm with too much
hyperbole

Thanks for reading

- Alan

* I'll resist the temptation to bitch about certain projects