At a technical level, I wish that GNOME made it easier to relate the visible GUI level to the underlying level of the command line.
When I designed GDB, previous debuggers for C programs had C-level commands (viewing source code, specifying line numbers, examining data using symbol names and displaying values as C structures) and machine-level commands (viewing instructions, specifying addresses, examining data as words or bytes) and no easy way to connect between them. That was often a hassle, so I took care to provide ways to move between the two levels, for instance to convert addresses into line numbers and vice versa. The GNU system today has a similar kind of problem in that error messages from GNOME say nothing about what's going on at a lower level. They only say "This didn't work". It seems to be intended to completely hide the lower levels of the system even when we WANT to look at them. I suppose most users don't know about the lower levels and don't want to know. But many users do want to know; they want a way to find out about the failure: what program, what command was run, what process, what file, what error message, etc. For the next major release, how about providing a systematic way to get this information in windows that pop up to tell you something failed? _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
