Re: one question and one proposal

[Christopher Blizzard <blizzard appliedtheory com>]

robert havoc pennington wrote:
> I don't think it's a big deal until Gnome is almost finished; it's trivial
> to fix this little stuff later. But it's the kind of final polish that
> will make the desktop really professional-feeling, so I hope it happens
> before Gnome 1.0.
> 

Quite true.  There's still a lot of development in the gnome-libs which
help determine exactly what the user interface policy is going to be. 
They are shaping up though.

> > well for small changes I think this is happening ... for large changes
> > and revisions ... it would probably better to talk to the maintainer
> > before doing a large change ... maybe the author had something similiar
> > in mind or something different ...
> >
> 
> I think it's not happening in lots of little cases where there's no clear
> policy... I agree it'd be good to talk to the maintainer, I think the
> important thing is just that not following the style guide be considered a
> bug, until a good case is made that the style doesn't fit a particular
> application. i.e. "I think the style guide is wrong" can never be a
> justification for not following it; that's only a justification for
> changing the style guide. "The style guide doesn't make sense for my app"
> is a fine justification for not following it.
> 

I would suggest contacting the author before calling it a "bug."  A bug
is really something that causes a crash or some functionality that
doesn't work the way that it's supposed to.  User interface problems
should really be "feature requests."

> One good thing about the style team fixing the problems is that they're
> then writing code, and people feel better about it. Patches are always
> preferred to suggestions.
> 
> > but for small inconsistencies among gnome apps .. yes it would be a good
> > idea to go through the apps and make em all consistent with the style
> > guide
> >
> 
> First the style guide needs some major updating, last time I looked at it
> anyway. I think it was written before most of gnome-libs, and it's all
> just a little too theoretical. When coding, I'd like a nice, practical
> checklist with lots of references to particular Gnome widgets and
> facilities.
> 

It was written way before gnome-libs.  Now that that's maturing somewhat
I'm going to be rewriting it.

--Chris

-- 

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Christopher Blizzard
AppliedTheory Communications, Inc. 
http://odin.appliedtheory.com/
blizzard@appliedtheory.com
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