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Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 13, 2023 6:22 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update by raven667
Parent article: Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

> > If you want to serve a certain group and to keep all members of said group happy needs, say, 100 options you need those 100 options in the UI.

> Sure, and that's how you end up with MS Word where every possible feature any big customer needed over the last 40 years has been implemented and is in the UI. I'm sure that has sold a lot but I'm not sure it's made the UI better

> > I think, the mentality should be all about how to organise those options into logical hierarchies.

> And that explains the ribbon menu concept, organize the options by frequency of use and logical hierarchy

And I know I bang on about it, but this is also the "wizard" mentality - "that's what they asked for, let's give it to them". The *correct* approach (imho) is to ask "what is the underlying problem", and give THAT to them.

Which is why WordPerfect came up with the idea of physical and logical pages, and solved the problem of booklets and labels (and probably several other things) with ONE feature, whereas Word has a bunch of - inflexible - one trick ponies. Ever tried to delete a *single* label from a sheet in Word? If you can edit the underlying database table, it's easy. If there isn't an underlying database of some sort, you're stuffed ...

Cheers,
Wol


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Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 15, 2023 20:18 UTC (Mon) by MrWim (subscriber, #47432) [Link] (6 responses)

> And I know I bang on about it, but this is also the "wizard" mentality - "that's what they asked for, let's give it to them". The *correct* approach (imho) is to ask "what is the underlying problem", and give THAT to them.

That comes with risks as well of course. Unless you have a really good understanding of the problem you risk "Even better than that!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11fCIGcCa9c . Understanding other peoples' problems is **hard** and requires empathy and humility.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 15, 2023 22:53 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

It's really not that hard to step back, and look at a truth table, isn't it?

If the customer asks for a solution to a problem, STEP BACK. All too often it's a special case (like MS's label problem). Solve the GENERAL problem - and by trying to identify the general problem that will help you understand the customer's problem! - and then solving the customer's problem will probably be much easier as well.

That's what gets me, again and again. People can't see beyond the end of their noses, and by fixing the special case they screw up the general case.

Perfect example - I've got a weird setup where if I let my distro update /boot, it basically trashes it and renders the system unbootable. Gentoo has a flag - "don't automount /boot". Which is, basically, UTTERLY USELESS.

If I don't have a \boot partition, it does nothing (of course). If I do have a \boot partition the flag defaults to false and trashes my setup. If I set the flag to true, the obvious thing to do is update the \boot directory. Except it doesn't. It just demands I set the flag to false and aborts. WHAT'S THE POINT OF HAVING IT!?

And then the workarounds I get given (a) don't actually do what I want, and (b) don't work. I was advised to set the "don't install" flag ??? but I DO want it to install! I jiust want it to install in the \boot directory, not the boot partition. Even worse, setting the "don't install" flag changes the directory search order and causes the build to crash with "modules not found"???

Seriously, how much effort does it take to step back, and think "does what I'm doing make sense?". It appears a LOT of people can't. Even when a bug report points it out to them. (Okay, my fruity language didn't help. But I always work on the basis "if the person I'm dealing with is frustrated by things OUT OF THEIR CONTROL, then give them slack"!

My big bugbear is that communication is supposed to be two-way. If you don't listen, and try to understand, then communication is impossible. (Yes I now some people might level that accusation at me ... :-) And an important part of listending is trying to understand other peoples' frustration.

Cheers,
Wol

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 16, 2023 7:13 UTC (Tue) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Often these options historically come from completely different use cases and only appear to fit your use case by accident. But the devs cannot adapt them to the new use case because of xkcd 1172.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 18, 2023 7:30 UTC (Thu) by dullfire (guest, #111432) [Link] (1 responses)

out of curiosity: which Gentoo packages are you talking about? It sounds like it's kernel related, but beyond installing the kernel source packages, I have custom tooling to handle kernel builds & deployments

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 18, 2023 11:03 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I'm fairly sure it's genkernel. Building the initramfs etc.

I can't remember what happened, but it build grub.cfg, and messed it up. As did SUSE ... :-(

I've always stored multiple distros in a single /boot, with grub giving me a choice. Which means I need to hand-edit grub.cfg because the automated tools can't cope with several different / partitions in a single cfg file. And then my root partitions are in an lvm volume over raid and SUSE especially really fscked that up ...

Cheers,
Wol

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 18, 2023 13:14 UTC (Thu) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

>If the customer asks for a solution to a problem, STEP BACK. All too often it's a special case (like MS's label problem). Solve the GENERAL problem - and by trying to identify the general problem that will help you understand the customer's problem! - and then solving the customer's problem will probably be much easier as well.

If you are working for a paying customer you often don't have time to solve the general problem. The customer wants the fix right now, and you certainly can't bill the customer for the two week work that the general solution takes to implement, no matter how much prettier and more useful it might be in the long run.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 18, 2023 13:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

:-)

If you're a contractor, yes. If you're a software house, it's in your own interest to eat the cost. And - true for me for pretty much my entire career - if you're in-house, you should be telling your boss "fix it now, or it'll be more expensive later". Personally, I've rarely had problems getting that message across. YMMV.

Cheers,
Wol


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