On 03/10/2010 12:54, Miroslav Lachman wrote: > Dominic Fandrey wrote: >> On 03/10/2010 11:45, David DEMELIER wrote: >>> 2010/10/3 Matthew Seaman<m.sea...@infracaninophile.co.uk>: >>> I don't want something complex, checkbox, textbox, radiobuttons is >>> enough. >> >> Textbox is _very_ complex. Think of all the code you'd have to >> add to ports to check what was entered by the user. >> At the very least you have to verify that whatever was provided >> is valid. For the feature not to become annoying you'd have to >> be a lot more fuzzy and complex, though. > > You don't need to. It is the same as if user put something wrong in to > make.conf, ports.conf or even if somebody do: > > cd /usr/ports/databases/mysql51-server > make WITH_CHARSET=UTF13 WITH_XCHARSET=1 WITH_COLLATION=true
No, it's technically the same, but from a usability standpoint this is entirely different. In your examples a user makes an educated and competent change, the user acted on his own behalf. When you pop up a dialogue and ask the user for something you better have a) a good reason, b) good defaults, c) give thorough guidance and explanation and d) offer a way to roll back the changes made. Or you can kiss your users good bye. > All of them are invalid and not checked by ports framework, so if > somebody implements textbox in to OPTIONS framework, the situation will > not be worse! Situation will be better for those users not familiar with > WITH_XXXX knobs. You're mistaking a usability issue with a technical one. Jef Raskin's Humane Interface is a good starting point. Regards -- A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail? _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"