Re: Preferences [Was: a whole lot of other things, too]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Rui Miguel Silva Seabra <rms 1407 org> writes: 
> I read your article, and I believe it is fundamentally flawed because of
> bad premises.

So refute the premises. ;-) 

You haven't answered the questions.
 
> Exactly, keep all of them. Some may need relocation.

You can't have all possible preferences; there are an infinite number.
This is just a fact. Do you refute that?

If not, then explain how you would decide which to have. "all" is not
an answer. "All" is not even possible. So Question One: what is your
guideline?

So far everyone complaining about loss of preferences has failed to
answer this question. If you don't answer this question, you are just
complaining, you aren't offering a reasonable solution.

Each preference has a number of costs, as I outlined in my article.
Do you disagree with those costs?  Question Two: If you disagree, why?
Give rationale addressing each specific cost.  If you don't disagree,
how do you suggest we have "all" preferences without incurring massive
costs?
 
GNOME will always have some "traditional free software user" features
such as window manager focus mode; don't worry. But if we let
traditional users bully us into doing the wrong thing for 
the future users GNOME is intended to acquire then we are incompetent, 
plain and simple.

In the immediate future our future users are mostly technical users -
sysadmins, software developers, btw. They _are_ advanced users. But
they're advanced users who are not used to bad UI.

> However, there's no law against new ways of doing things. So I'd
> suggest, in addition to the existing pref tabs, we get one that's called
> "raw options", "advanced", or something like that, containing *all*
> options.

If you want a different UI for advanced settings, please, feel free to
write one.

I've always encouraged people to write a "power toys" prefs
application that exposes the hidden options in a nice way. Please feel
free to do that. Just don't dump the UI for this in the main control
panels.

Havoc