Linus Torvalds
Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:17:20 -0800
[ away for the long weekend, am back now ] On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote: > > So I added your patches to bugzilla this weekend, in an attempt to be > constructive on my own part also. So far two of them are merged and > based on the discussion I see that a 3rd one will probably go in today. > > If you are interested the tracker bug is here: > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408898
Heh. One of the reasons I dislike bugzilla: it works differently for
everybody. The gnome bugzilla looks a lot prettier than the kernel one,
but either I'm confused or you are, because you seem to have made all the
patches separate bugzilla entries (maybe that's just how gnome patches are
supposed to be done? It was nonobvious to actually find the discussion
about the patches themselves from the bug you pointed at ;^).
> In regards to Devil's pie I didn't link it as an example of something
> that did exactly what you wanted, I linked it to show that there where
> tools for doing further customizing of components in GNOME.
Sure. And that's what "control-center" is too.
I'm a bit confused why it's apparently considered to be a good idea to do
something in an add-on program, but not in the standard control center
app?
Yeah, Devil's pie apparently does other things too (ie it waits for window
events etc, if I understood it right), but in many ways, for things that
are just pure configuration, it seems to be some psychological trick where
things that aren't "allowed" by the core people because they are against
the HID guidelines can apparently only be broken by external programs?
It's like "we know people want to break out guidelines, and we add the
config options to allow them to do so, but then because they break the
guidelines we don't allow those options to be set by any standard
configuration tool".
It's that a bit dodgy? Wouldn't it be better to just admit that the HID
guidelines are just defaults - instead of being in denial about it and
saying "they're just defaults, but they are defaults that you have to use
some other program to change?"
> My feeling was that you where extrapolating from your one missing
> feature that GNOME offered no configurable features.
Sure I was. No question about that. But I'm not exactly extrapolating from
a single feature. It was just one _I_ happened to care about, but others
care about other features, and looking at the bugzilla discussions, I
notice that people there argue about removing *other* config options (ie
look at how there's somebody pointing to bugzilla entry 154614: "Consider
removing the auto-raise preference from the user interface").
In other words, in the very same discussion about the one feature _I_ care
about, there's another gnome developer who argues that gnome should remove
ANOTHER configuration entry that somebody else is bound to care about.
So I object to you claiming that I'm only extrapolating from "one missing
feature". For _me_ it was one missing feature. But that's not what I use
to extrapolate from. I use the *fact* that Gnome has in the past removed
other features, and is *still* apparently talking about removing yet more
config options from view.
WHY? It's a disease, I tell you. The apparent inability to accept the fact
that we're not all a uniform gray paste.
That very bugzilla entry shows exactly the problem I have. Apparently
gnome thinks that "few people" using a feature means that it shouldn't be
exposed. Can you say "gray uniform goo, based on some populist message
where experts and people who have an opinion are to be shunned and looked
down upon"?
So yes, for *me* it was one feature that simply makes Gnome totally
unusable on some of my machines (and since I want uniformity on *my*
machines, that measn that it's unusable on them all). But that's not the
reason I extended it to "gnome people don't seem to like people who want
to do their own thing".
Linus
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