Re: Extending GtkMountOperation to support TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt

[Simon McVittie <smcv collabora com>]

On Fri, 02 Feb 2018 at 18:02:24 +0100, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 2:15 PM, segfault <segfault riseup net> wrote:
> >    A team mate will also send an
> >    email regarding this to GNOME UX people in the next days, so you won't
> >    see any code from us implementing a GUI design that they have not
> >    accepted. I'm stating this so you can ignore the GUI design implications
> >    for now.
[...]
> Doesn't sound like the greatest user experience, having to specify
> a ton of arcane details like that...

I don't think features like this can be completely decoupled from their
UX. It is sometimes possible to make a good API for a low-level feature
without having the UI fully ready or thought through, but IMO it's usually
still necessary to ask yourself "what would a UI for this look like?" -
otherwise you'll accidentally produce an API that isn't sufficient to
back up the UI you want.

So I would recommend working with UX people to describe the technical
constraints imposed by TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt, then working out what a
reasonable UI to gather that information might look like, and only then
designing the plumbing to get that information down to the implementation
(indeed, having a rough design for the UI might make the right structure
for that plumbing obvious).

If TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt require a lot of technical minutiae to be specified
(rather than learning them from header metadata like e.g. LUKS does)
then it might not be possible to make the resulting UI particularly
friendly, but putting a bit of design work into a "least-bad" UI would
probably still be valuable.

    smcv