Re: The HIG and Open a Copy

Dom wrote:
> What is *crystal clear* to me is that we can't have is
> CVS HEAD being used as a UI playground, and then have
> discussions about it after the fact. Even though CVS
> branches are a pain in the butt, they have their uses.
>
> Rob, if you want to, create a CVS branch to demo UI
> changes. Or create more mock-ups/patches and post them
> to the list and bugzilla. I think that our menus are a
> cluttered, disorganized mess. And I think that a lot
> of our dialogs could be simplified and reorganized to
> better help our users. But we need to have these talks
> before we make sweeping changes rather than
> afterwords. I appreciate your enthusiasm.

Amen on both counts. I feel very strongly that no matter what the HEAD
must not be treated as a scrapbook. The same thing, just on a smaller
scale, has been done recently with the Language dialogue and all we have
to show for it is wasted time. If we are to minimise this, we have to
talk about these things before we make changes: just because something
does not seem optimal to one developer does not mean that the person who
implemented that did not think about the issues involved; there might
well be a better solution, but it might also be that the person who
wants to make the changes missed things that matter. It is for this
reason that the ethos of AbiWord development has always been to consult
the list before making changes. Apart from this kind of self-discipline,
the only other way of preventing the HEAD from becoming uncontrollable
mess is to severely reduce commit rights and have developers to submit
patches for approval, and I am sure that no-body wants to go down that
route.

I would really like the changes to the menus to be reverted ASAP (before
it becomes too much mess) and start this all over again.

Tomas
Received on Tue Feb 22 08:55:37 2005