On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 12:36:17PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote:
> > Those of you who wish this option to remain, speak now or forever hold
> > your peace. With justifications, please !
>
> The findings of such a survey would be more valid IMO if it were asked
> on the users list also (as you haven't cc'd that list and I'm no
> longer subscribed to it I'm assuming you didn't ask there for fear of
> finding out that some people actually use it).
Contrary to what you seem to think, the existence of a user using an
option is not a reason in itself to keep it. I am not attempting to do a
survey, I am attempting to gather the rationale for its existence.
Asking people directly often causes complaints, when if you just /do/
something, it won't. Observe the difference between not allowing
mouse-focussing of the minibuffer (5 bug reports so far I think ...)
and the 6 million other things that changed between 1.1.6 and 1.2.0,
which nobody has complained about, because it's just /right/ now.
> I've tried both the old and new methods of buffer naming and while the
> new (name it when you save it) method is okay for short, off-the-cuff
> docs I still prefer to name my files when I start writing them. This
> was particularly the case when I started a new multi-part doc and I
> had sketched out the TOC on paper first. It was much, much simpler
> to name the document I was about to begin as I created it since I knew
> exactly what it was and the process flow of editing was not
> fragmented.
>
> By fragmented I mean I either had to edit then save before creating
> the next file or edit all the files and then go back and save-and-name
> them based on the reading the chapter titles -- I don't like either of
> these routes.
>
> So, I vote to keep this option because it makes creating multi-part
> docs like theses (which is one of the most common uses of LyX)
> straight forward.
The real fix for this is a multi-part document outliner.
You must admit that without this option you have a simple work around,
so you cannot use a usability argument like this in defence of keeping
the option, given that a) no other application does anything like this
(I suppose I am going to get told that emacs or something equally
screwed up does this) b) it complicates the code c) it complicates the
prefs d) it complicates the menu handling (ellipsis or no ellipsis ?).
In particular we have had a /wrong/ menu text for the default (off) for
quite some time.
All UID is a matter of trade-offs. I don't deny that for you, it might
be more convenient for you to type a name in up-front, but we must
counter that against the unnecessary UI complexity this brings. Breaking
consistency and conformity with other applications has to have a very
very good reason: I don't think the above counts.
> > We should kill the pref and just not ask.
>
> How long is your kill list? Maybe we could deal with them in batches
> to speed up the process.
Har-har. And yes, it's very very long (auto-region-delete anybody ?)
regards
john
--
"If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if
it is only owned & not shared."
- St. Augustine
