Re: A Violent Realisation [Was: Preferences]

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Mon, 2002-04-29 at 15:38, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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.

Right. I think we're both mainly on the same page, here... it's about
balance; I worry sometimes that what you yourself have termed
'irrational' views on UI are (1) dominant and (2) more important not
balanced.

> 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). 

Fair enough. See below.

> See the quote from Linus in my article.

I refuse to believe that Linus knows anything about release engineering
:) nor even that much about design. We can and should aim to do better
than the 2.[3|4].x kernel cycle.

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

Like I said we're on the same page- I'm not claiming that you are trying
to do this, and even if you were, I think you'd have at least /some/
justification :) I'm just urging slightly more calm and detailed looks
at what we are slashing and burning as we do it... that was a pre-2.0
mistake which I hope we can learn to avoid in the future.

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

If we're on the same page about that then I'll pretty much shut up
because we've all learned the lesson and I have utter faith that we'll
behave as if we've learned post-2.0. :) 

> 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.

Yup. Agreed completely

> 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.

I don't, and haven't, argued for returning viewports or whatever the
heck we just dropped :). I very specifically said I'll happily deal with
people who whine/file about those, and about similar, sane reductions.
It's just the specific functionality (that we both seem to agree is very
important) that I worry about, that's all. I agree completely with how
you plan to solve it, and will do my best to shield you from complaints
that originate from my corner of the world. I just hope in the future
(1) we get these things aired out as quickly as possible in the
devel/release cycle, to minimize the pain and flamage and (2) we don't
chop for the sake of chopping. It looks like you're aware of both of
those issues then I'll go back to Real Work now. :) 

Luis