[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Kind of a truism there.  The interesting discussion is about how to
> implement software design in practice. The way you're phrasing it, it
> sounds as if software without infinite/all-possible features all
> equally emphasized and accessible is somehow broken. You aren't giving
> any kind of guideline for what to include or exclude or emphasize.[1]

Arguing by reductio-ad-absurdum is a known logical fallacy.  Yet you do 
it.

Taking _anything_ to the extreme is bad. And no, that's not at all the way 
I was phrasing it, even if you'd like to put it that way just to be able 
to ignore my argument.

The thing that people were talking about were not in the least "all 
possible features". In fact, I explicitly pointed out that the feature _I_ 
find most irritating is one that EVERY SINGLE other WM implements. Except 
the default gnome one.

And the feature that started this discussion wasn't some "infinite" or 
"all-possible" one. No, it was a feature that was mentioned as already 
being done by the KDE equivalent, and having been shot down by gnome 
people as being against "usability".

In other words, nobody expects gnome to be "infinitely flexible". 

What I (and everybody I've seen) are arguing for is that gnome should not 
be _less_ flexible than the alternatives.

Yet currently it clearly is. By a mile. Often the reason is quoted as 
being because of "usability". Preferably together with a high-and-mighty 
smirk about how technical people don't understand it, and that nipples 
are intuitive.

			Linus