On Thu, March 27, 2008 9:46 pm, David Brown wrote: > On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 08:57:54PM -0700, Lan Barnes wrote: >> >>On Thu, March 27, 2008 4:43 pm, David Brown wrote: >>> On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 04:05:34PM -0700, Lan Barnes wrote: >>> >>>>I completely disagree. Successful progress should be silent. If >>>>reassurance is necessary, a -v or -h (as in "print hash marks") can be >>>>added. >>> >>> It's fine that you disagree, but not very significant. A vast majority >>> of >>> users want/need progress. User interface guidelines require it. >> >>Whose interface guidelines, we ask. > > All, as far as I know. It is pretty much a universal guideline, to the > point where I would argue that "Successful progress should be silent" is > just plain wrong, at least in the sense that everyone disagrees with it. >
My momma told me "everybody's doing it" is a lousy argument many years ago and it hasn't improved in my view. There is a rationale for silence == success, to wit, it simplifies internals and pipes/scripting. There is a rationale for lots of messages, to wit, my users are morons and will fuck things up unless I hum lullibies to them. You might be able to talk me into progress bars in a GUI environment because (1) GUIs have a higher concentration of morons using them, and (2) GUIs are more fragile and can be made to freeze up more easily. But to remind everyone, cdparanoia was the original subject in this thread, and cdparanoia is CLI ... a CLI program that defaults to putting out smiley faces to stderr on success. -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
