unaccessability

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

While this has been amusing, a lot of useful detail may be lost in the
furor. There are some good philosophy questions about what GUI's
should support for replacing command line tools (the gnome
installation tool), hooks for getting command line tools to pop up as
GUI icons and behavior correctly, etc.

But I'd like to strongly suggest stepping back and thinking about
"what should the GUI do, and how". Rather than merely pouring feature
and workaround and tweak after tweak into the GUI's, go take a good
look at Eric Raymond's essay on "The Luxury of Ignorance" and ask "is
this tool doing what a casual user reasonably expects it to do"?
System management tools such as package managers, benefit tremendously
from clarity. So a tool that has "install updates", but only lists the
downloaded on ones, would benefit from being clear and saying "install
downloaded updates".

The practice of wrapping command line tools (such as yum) in GUI's can
be done well, but it often breaks down because the new GUI tries to
wrap new features into the workflow without telling anyone, and
creates a workflow that is inconsistent with or can't even be
replicated from the command line tools without hand-editing config
files.  And the command line tools, in turn, break the GUI managed
settings. It can get nasty. (Don't get me started on NetworkManager!)

So step back, and let's think "how can we make this work for someone
who hasn't seen it before and doesn't know how to hand-edit config
files"?


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 1:33 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2013-11-17 at 05:33 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 12:50:11PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
>> > Oh, hey, look. That place is rapidly becoming the 'crap, we don't know
>> > where to put this' dumping ground for GNOME 3, isn't it?
>>
>> It has been there since 3.0 AFAIK, so rapidly becoming is incorrect.
>
> It keeps growing more bits, though.
>
>> Anyway, calling design decisions "crap" and "dumping ground" is kind of
>> needlessly emotional.
>
> No emotion involved, I'm afraid.
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