[Pan-users] Re: Options, multiplicity of

[Duncan]

Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Thu, 07 May 2009
16:17:36 +0000:

> Duncan commented in another thread :
> 
>> [pan is a Gnome app.]  As such, I suppose it's to be expected
>> that it gets infected with the "users are scared of too many
>> options" meme that so frustrates many power and KDE users trying to
>> use Gnome and Gnome family apps.  OTOH, there's others, the "I just
>> want it to work as it is, I get confused if there's too many options"
>> folks, that do just that, get confused, by all the options typically
>> exposed by a KDE app, so whatever.
> 
> Seems to me there's a third way, especially for Charles. Other
> linux apps, such as Brasero and K3b, make lots of options available, but
> manage to set the defaults very well. So does Pan, already.
> 
> Those of us who know little and care less about CD/DVD technology
> can ignore them, and the apps "just work" (TM). But those who know more
> can (I think) get at the places to do the tweaks they want.

That's a useful observation and example, particularly about k3b, given 
that it is a KDE app, but a universally recognized one for being so 
useful in general, with lots of options but good defaults for those who 
don't want to mess with them.

> This is a huge, invaluable advance -- and one right up Charles's
> alley. It's also, praise be!, the way Linux in general has been
> developing for the last ten or twelve years. (Look at installers and
> updaters, for instance. In '98 I couldn't even manage to install RH6;
> now I try about a dozen distros on things like the EeePC, to find one
> that suits both it and me, and think little of it -- not because I've
> changed much, but because the installers have.)
> 
> Until the advent of K3b (or until someone told me of it; I run
> Gnome, and have a strange aversion to most of KDE), I'd've had to go
> take another master's degree, or at least do enough work for one, to
> have become able to use any ripper or burner out there. Now I do it all
> the time.

The cool thing about this, and it applies from both the developer and 
user perspective, is that with FLOSS in particular, once one app in a 
genre gets it right and a user gets it working, it becomes far easier for 
others.

IOW, from a user perspective, now that you know k3b, you're already half 
way to getting any other burning app working as well, so you're not 
restricted to just k3b any longer.  (Maybe k3b isn't available on the 
friend's machine you happen to be using when you want to burn a CD with 
some files to take home, and now you find it isn't so hard after all, to 
use what he does have available.)

>From a developer perspective, once the one app does it, the code or 
simply the ideas are easy enough to borrow and apply to other apps of the 
same genre.  Thus, advances made to one installer soon make pretty much 
every installer out there easier to use, and soon enough, the user that 
was having trouble getting just one -- any one -- to work, now has his 
choice of dozens. =:^)

> Similarly with Pan -- and here we have a parade example, as the
> Germans would say.
> 
> My arrangement with Alpine (first to get it to work with Pan, and
> then to make the font size legible) was perfectly feasible, once I
> needed it and found people here who knew things; but until that arose, I
> had gone on happily using Pan for years, in blissful ignorance of one
> whole complexity.
> 
> Therefore I hope, when he next gets to Pan again, Charles will
> exercise his talent in setting defaults, and trust it when in doubt.

Well stated.

Actually, while I grumble from time to time, I can also note that pan is 
one GTK/Gnome app that I do use, in part because it /does/ expose 
necessary tweaks, at least in the config file if not in the GUI as I'd 
probably do it if it were me.

During the early pan 0.9x version days, after the rewrite was made public 
but before people had a chance to request features that they really 
couldn't do without (that Charles had left out deliberately, in ordered 
to find just which features of old-pan people actually used and which 
were, practically speaking, simply bloat), I actually had that driven 
home to me.

Apparently, most folks use a paper-like light background, dark text, on 
their computer.  I find such an interface extremely hard to work with, 
preferring instead a dark background with light text.  Thus that's how I 
have my preferences set.[1]  As it happened, pan's initial defaults 
simply didn't work ("invisible" text, because foreground and background 
are too close to the same color) with that due to incorrect assumptions 
about what "everybody's" GUI color config was going to be like.  As a 
result, I simply could not use new-pan until Charles included the 
appropriate color config options in preferences, so I could adjust that 
text to some color that was actually visible against the background.

So yes, pan is an unusual Gnome app in that it does include more options 
than most do -- enough to make it actually usable, for some of us.  But 
it's also pretty good about selecting defaults -- unless like me you're a 
user that has rather atypical global desktop defaults, in which case, 
pan's default color scheme may cause various bits of text to be 
invisible, as they were initially, here.  But that's what preferences are 
actually FOR, and someone that has obviously messed with global defaults 
to that extent can reasonably be expected to go looking for the 
appropriate pan preferences to fix things, when he notes that it hasn't 
properly accounted for his global preference changes.

.....

[1] In fact this was one of the big problems I had with Gnome back before 
I dumped it, it didn't give me specific enough control over the color 
options to get everything setup the way I wanted/needed. KDE did.  This 
was Gnome 1 BTW, things initially got far worse with Gnome 2, tho they've 
come back from the extreme to some degree of late, but they still don't 
to my knowledge offer the simple color config applet that KDE does, NOT a 
whole theme selection applet, one that allows setting colors for 
individual GUI elements, and I still don't use Gnome without what I 
consider such a baseline config applet -- even proprietaryware MS Windows 
offers /that/. (Or at least it did, back at the turn of the century when 
I last used it, before I jumped to freedomware. I assume it still does.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman