Re: [Libreoffice] [PUSHED] fdo#31251 - Improve default page layout

Hi Sebastien,

On Tue, 2011-03-08 at 09:09 +0100, Sébastien Le Ray wrote:
> this simple shadow patch has generated a long discussion on
> Libreoffice-design. Some people don't like the color, some people don't
> like the amount of blur, some people want no shadow at all, some people
> want a "4 borders" shadow. So here is a second patchset that tries to
> address the first three critics :

        So - firstly, this -sounds- like an interaction disaster :-) I hope it
is not of course, but it looks like this:

        We finally get a competant, enthusiastic, motivated developer -
actually fixing our horrible user interface problems: and he does some
great improvement - and our design guys apparently emit a long stream of
complaining left and right ! That, if true, is hard to excuse.

        We need to greet new guys with a torrent of encouragement instead I
think. I hope I'm wrong - I don't read the design list because I can't
interact there [ Reply-To: mangling sucks ;-] - but this paragraph
smells problematic. I think we need to remember that the perfect is the
sworn enemy of the good - so lets get good across the code, before we
get perfect.

        Perhaps we should move all programmer interaction on design / UI topics
onto this list, or a new Freedesktop one - and leave the 'design' list
as more of a 'discuss' type forum.

        Sebastien, I hear the complaints; and I read your nice patches (and
just pushed them[1]), but did you really want to do all of this ? If
not, I'll revert what you don't like. Personally, I would have preferred
you to move on to some other fun / high-impact win, rather than getting
bogged down in random details here ;-)

        You did a great job learning how the .src / etc. madness works
though :-) good stuff there, it is not completely obvious.

>  - It adds a configuration option
..
> - It adds a configuration option to disable shadow;

        In my experience of user interaction - adding configuration options is
a cowardly, and silly way to deal with disagreements about defaults :-)
[ not your fault, the design team's issue; check out the settings dialog
in any Apple product ].

        IMHO we badly need to hide / remove tons of our pointless configuration
options - which incidentally also slow down program execution, slow down
our startup, bloat our user interface, make testing harder, and thus our
code buggier and so on. [ At least, I'm willing to argue that in detail
but ... ;-]

        Personally, I liked what Sebastian did originally - it was sufficiently
better to be really nice; was there any real need to bloat the feature,
further complicate the code, and discuss this minutia to death ? do I
really need a green page shadow ?

> I'll let design team play and discuss with that, when they agree on a
> default, I'll provide an additional patch to take it into account.

        Thanks for your patience Sebastien, I'd just recommend moving onto
something else at speed ;-)

> Note: I had to perform a make dev-install for settings to be correctly
> saved.

        Ah yes - this is a mis-feature of linkoo - that we don't link the
configuration data (possibly we cannot if it is processed in some way -
but perhaps we can do better; cf. solenv/bin/linkoo).

        Anyhow - nice patches; but a pain to commit (lots of modules) can you
go through the process here and mail me the bug # please ? then
hopefully you can push your changes yourself:

        http://freedesktop.org/wiki/AccountRequests

        Thanks !

                Michael.

[1] - I'd still feel happier if we could have the bitmaps as member
variables somewhere, rather than 
-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot