* Josselin Mouette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [070725 06:10]: > Le mercredi 25 juillet 2007 à 00:14 -0500, Manoj Srivastava a écrit : > > The latter might be fine as a local policy; but surely is not > > correct as a Debian default. We should make it _possible_ to implement > > a local policy of hiding information from users; but we must not let > > information hiding be the default; nor the only possible local policy.
Exactly. > > No. We should hide part of the information by default, but make it both > possible: > * for users to access the extra information without anything too > complicated; > * for administrators to really lock information if that's really > useful. > > Relevant information easily gets lost when there is too much of it, > which is why a *default* setup should never show all available > information. And this isn't only relevant for menus. > Absolutely *wrong*. Gnome and KDE are targeted primarily at desktop users, not servers. If, as a desktop user, I install a graphical app on my machine, I *expect* to see that app in the main menu. The place where I put important and/or frequently used apps is on a panel/toolbar. If a novice user installs an app and then goes to the menu and doesn't find it, how is this user supposed to know what to do? This is completely *un*usable. The more novice the user, the more important it is for the *default* to be for all graphical apps to be shown. Then let the individual user decide which ones are important to him/her. Menus, by their nature, are inherently unusable for the most frequently used apps, and we should not be trying to make them more usable at the expense of making less frequently used apps harder to access. Menus make less frequently used apps easy to get at, while toolbars make frequently used apps even easier; use the right tool for the right job. If Gnome were to have a "menu policy" configuration, with the Debian default being "show all apps", but which made it easy for the "less is more useable" camp to accept someone else's idea of "most important apps" with a single setting rather than having to wade through the menu editor, I would find that an excellent compromise. As for multiuser systems and servers, the same logic applies. The Debian default should be to show all apps, then let the sysadmin tailor that for the installation, then let the users fine tune it. ...Marvin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
