Re: Baobab

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Emmanuele Bassi">

> > Surely their goal is closer to "make more room on my disk for stuff I
> > care about" rather than "see how their files are big and where their
> > disk space went". :-)
> 
> I concede that one of the reasons behind looking "where the fuck my space
> went" is "I was ripping The Lord of the Rings extended edition DVDs and I
> ran out of space".
> 
> But another reason is that tiny little notification icon that says "dude,
> you have nearly no space left on the device", which by the way would be
> cool if had a link saying "run the disk usage tool to see if the porn
> folder is out of control".

Right - but that tool is not Baobab.

> > Which user experience do you think is most helpful and/or delightful?
> 
> Let's see.
> 
> Is more helpful a distribution-dependent tool

I see no reason why it would be distribution dependent.

> that, for what we know, may well be ready for GNOME 4.0, in a distant
> future where we all have flying cars, the stable Debian release is 5.0 and
> GNOME runs on an artificial intelligence that periodically scans my
> folders and tells me I be better off copying my Music folder on my
> portable holographic mass storage; or is more helpful something that works
> right now, albeit with some rough edges that can be smoothed?

Why do you have to make your point in this way? If you're asking when it is
likely to be ready, I believe it is targeted at the October release (but I
do not know for sure), and it would be entirely appropriate for us to reach
out to that Ubuntu community member and suggest they participate upstream.

> > Before saying "we don't have this functionality therefore we must put it
> > in", we really need to analyse what the actual problems are for our
> > users, and think critically about how to solve them in helpful and/or
> > delightful ways. I'm not suggesting that's easy, of course. :-)
> 
> I'm thinking of the *actual* problems, and I see a solution that fits well
> what our users need now; a solution that can be improved from an already
> working code base.

I think my descriptions demonstrate that it is not approaching the problem
in a user-centric way. Why jam in an existing tool when it is not really
what we want to deliver to our users?

I think this is a really important discussion, and I'm disappointed that you
have approached it like this.

- Jeff

-- 
linux.conf.au 2007: Sydney, Australia           http://lca2007.linux.org.au/
 
    "From my observation, when it comes to porting Linux to a particular
           device, a point doesn't appear to be necessary." - mpt