low-hanging fruit

[Owen Taylor]

On 8/22/07, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> I'm a little bothered that you're picking and choosing which questions
> you think users can answer. I think users can intelligibly understand
> statements about gpg keys. The difference here is that I'm assuming that
> users are smarter and/or capable of using google to understand what's
> going on.

I'm perfectly willing to concede that user are *able* to understand
these messages if they take the time. They probably have a college
degree, assemble furniture with cryptic instructions translated from
Japanese, and file their taxes every April. But what I don't concede
is that they *want to* understand these messages or *will bother* to
understand these messages.

I see no value training up our users to understand how to import GPG
keys into RPM. Our users should be spending their brain cells
designing bridges and curing cancer. (And maybe buying shoes on Ebay
too). Our job is to make package installation not consume those brain
cells.

This has all strayed off pretty far into theory-land. Maybe you can
give a concrete example of a concrete case (starting with why the user
is in the GUI tool to begin with) of when a user needs to be asked a
yum-specific question when interacting with a GUI tool?

- Owen