[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

Aaron J. Seigo aseigo at kde.org
Mon Dec 12 22:56:21 PST 2005


goddess on a toadstool! 

we have better things to do than discover what we don't agree on (that's easy, 
actually; i could stay home by myself and do that). if we want a positive 
challenge let's just recognize that we don't have the same personas in mind 
when we write software, and others are allowed to believe that our personas 
are as real as purple fairies that sit on toadstools and grant wishes. we may 
totally disagree with each other's approaches on certain things. and ...


			 it doesn't matter.


i'm not here to debate these things, and quite frankly neither should anyone 
else be. this isn't the venue for that. we're here to find common ground, the 
discordiant ground be damned.

we all want something sane for ISVs, a more functional FreeDesktop.org and 
better hardware drivers to name just 3 things. let's get to working on those 
common goals.

we can screw up our own software on our own time and bitch at each other about 
our mistakes somewhere else. let's do something constructive in this venue.


and because sometime repetition works best, let's go at this another way:

On Monday 12 December 2005 23:05, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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]

daring to speak for Linus ... that's not what i hear him saying. Linus is 
simply saying that software ought to provide some rational means to get at 
what people need. in the case of printing, KDE, Windows and MacOS all manage 
to do this pretty darn well. in KDE we've hidden almost all the gory-style 
details behind a Properties button, a seperate control panel and a Options>> 
button in the printer dialog itself which expands the dialog to show the 
scary underbelly of printing complexity. 

the user gets a simple interface by default, while still being able to get to 
the more complex stuff. we don't expose everything, and what we do expose is 
not all exposed equally.

and it's *totally* cool if the GNOME project sees this differently. people 
will, as Linus has, vote with their feet based on how we envision our 
software into being. and they will likely vote in both directions. 

when we spoke about projects having individual identity in Portland, this is 
exactly the sort of thing i had in mind. i know that we have different 
philosophies on things. who here doesn't know that by now? =)

i also know that as long as we work on commonalities we'll fix things we can't 
fix on our own and we'll all win, regardless of whose approach is "more 
right", "less wrong", "better for aunt tilly" or "completely screwed up".

let's get our priorities straight here.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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