unaccessability

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2013-11-17 at 07:14 -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> 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"?

Um. What? Apart from the rude top-posting, I don't see how any of the
screed above relates to the discussion Olav and I were having at all.

> 
> 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.
> > --
> > Adam Williamson
> > Fedora QA Community Monkey
> > IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
> > http://www.happyassassin.net
> >
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-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net