Comments on: Features vs. Preferences

By: Philip Langdale

Philip Langdale — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

The problem I have with the current drive mount applet (and the reason it no longer graces my panel) is that it’s all or nothing - you can’t have a subset of mountable volumes and you can’t alter the layout. I have a 4-in-1 flash card reader, 2 cdroms and an ide floppy drive. So, I get dumped with 7 items inefficiently layed out (I use a single 48 pix panel; old school). I only use 1 of the 4 flash slots, so I’d rather ignore the other 3, and vertical items make a lot more sense for my panel dimensions.

By: Luca De Rugeriis

Luca De Rugeriis — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Same here: it would be nice if it was possible to hide some of the buttons.

By: Davyd

Davyd — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

James, you have provided us with a most wonderful example of our wonderfulness.

Philip/Luca, this is a common feature request, and is probably relevant to people with lots of little devices, so is a patch forthwith? If you were going to implement this, I would recommend storing a mask of drives to hide, rather than a list of drives to show. That way new devices that have never been seen before always appear, and could then be hidden by the user.

By: Daniel Borgmann

Daniel Borgmann — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Exactly, there is a huge difference between features and options. In the ideal case, the only choice a user _ever_ has to make should be “what do I want to do”. And that is what GNOME is all about.

Some people insist on having unlimited customizability available and I understand that GNOME isn’t the right desktop for them. But that is not the same as functionality. Functionality means to me “the ability to do something”, not “a specific method to do something”.

By: Stephane Chauveau

Stephane Chauveau — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I agree with the problem of having too many devices. The first thing to do would be insure that their order is somewhat predictable.

I think that the problem woud better be managed at a higher level. What I have in mind would be something like having a user preference file for libhal where keys could be specified for known devices.

For example, a removable device could have the key “.user_pref.show” with the values “always”, “when-mountable”
, “when-mounted” or “never”

By: Murray Cumming

Murray Cumming — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

> I only use 1 of the 4 flash slots, so I’d rather ignore the other 3

Wouldn’t it make sense to just automatically ignore drives that couldn’t be mounted, such as card slots with no cards in them? You don’t want to see them because there’s nothing you could do with them.

By: Ralph Wabel

Ralph Wabel — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

it would be enough if people can select which drives he wants to display on the panel. Some people only want their cd/dvd drives, but the rest they don’t care about. I really hope such a highly requested feature will be implemented!

By: Tomas Frydrych

Tomas Frydrych — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Except #4 is broken (see http://bugs.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319208), and without a preference to turn this ’smart’ behaviour off you are stuck with broken and rather irritating behaviour.

By: bu

bu — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8384&start=15