Re: A Violent Realisation [Was: Preferences]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Luis Villa <louie ximian com> writes: 
> All of this must be done without losing our traditional users.

Of course. I think it's entirely possible.

> The fears are not unfounded. I personally will have to deal with many
> dozens and/or hundreds of bug reports saying 'the 2.0 desktop is less
> functional than the 1.4 desktop.' They will be titled 'I don't have a
> viewport anymore.' That's fine; I can deal with those who are just
> whining because they can't find the same functionality in exactly the
> way they expected it. But when the functionality is not there at all (as
> with the notion of a two dimensional desktop) it's a legitimate
> regression, and a legitimate bug, and we're going to see a lot of
> those.

If you want to fix something, sometimes you have to break it first,
see what people complain about, then fix the complaints (always fixing
the _root_ problem, not just adding a "turn off the thing that bugs
me" button). See the quote from Linus in my article.

I don't think that justifies fears that all prefs/features will be
removed. That's not the idea.

And yes, many of these changes should have been postponed post-GNOME-2
from a releng standpoint.

In any case, for legit regressions on sensible features, I have no
disagreement with you. That's why getting grid geometry for workspaces
was on my "not puntable" list posted some days ago.

Just realize: maintainers that blindly add anything someone requests
end up maintaining a useless pile of junk. Luis, you can't please
everyone - if you try, you end up with design-by-committee crap that
pleases no one.

So insist that we fix things for real, rather than slapping the
band-aid back on as soon as someone squawks. And insist that
maintainers take the global view, keeping a consistent vision for the
software in question, and are willing to tell users "no" when "no" is
the right answer.

Havoc