On 08/07/2012 06:53 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 2:28 AM, Jay Smith wrote:
As many husbands have taken decades to learn (or else they are no longer
married), sometimes "writing all the reasoning down" won't make the wife
feel better. Right now, the developers are responding to an emotional
situation by saying something like "but we did what was logical, we even
wrote it down first". In the recorded history of human relations, I doubt
that response has worked on a regular, consistent basis.
Jay,
Let's not try fooling each other. The only thing the former community
is really going to accept is "Sorry, we screwed up, and you were right
all the time. We are going to revert, sorry again".
The former community will probably also accept "OK, we are going to
make this optional", except no two people so far agreed on how exactly
this should be done, and noone so far seems to have understood how
badly it would affect usability and code maintenance.
People just want the old stuff back at any cost. Not gonna happen.
Users become very attached to the software they use.
You make it sound like there are generations of people who passed the
habit of Ctrl+S for saving to PNG from father to son, whereas personal
digital image editing is barely 30 years old :)
When software evolves in a direction different from that user/workflow, the
user experiences *very personal* feelings of *loss*.
The strong feelings expressed in all these "yet another long threads" are
users expressing their feelings of _loss_.
And it is not just their _feelings_. Some of them will decide that they
will have to migrate to other software which does include them it its
"target user group". That migration comes at a very real cost of time,
effort, learning, and perhaps money.
Excuse me, but what is wrong with that picture? Human civilization
always needs time to adapt to new things. It was ever so.
Would you tell Wright brothers that they shouldn't have had come up
with their Flyer, because, ye gods, a hundred years later people still
got to spend some time to learn how to get the bloody thing take off?
:)
If the developers have made a mistake, it was possibly overlooking these
"feelings issues" and not expecting such a strong reaction. That is not to
say that the developers did not have to do what they did. However, they
should not have been surprised by the reaction.
We knew it was going to be crying and moaning all over the place. We
had early warnings of that, too. And actually we made few adjustments
to the new model to clarify things, e.g.
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?h=gimp-2-8&id=f4ce57aa9709e492666c16259e81625a3e4a7796
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?h=gimp-2-8&id=c3e904fab1b29224b7dd55bb5b4af49f34c3b335
Alexandre Prokoudine
Alexandre,
You made a very specific statement:
"I don't really understand why we need yet another
long thread to go through all these things yet again."
I attempted to explain my opinion of the situation, specifically in
regard to what you claimed you did not understand.
In return, I got back a dismissive reply that IMHO completely ignored
the intent of what I was trying to say. Your response has seriously
tested my respect for you -- I tried very hard to show my respect for you.
I was not trying to say that users _should or should not_ do/think/feel
this or that for whatever reason.
I was giving my opinion of the dynamics behind **WHY** they DO
think/feel this or that.
Either you read my words too quickly without taking time to understand
what I was getting at or you completely misunderstood what I was saying.
Your response does not jive with the intent of what I was writing.
In fact, you just got out a "bigger hammer" to try and pound the problem
down.
From this I am starting to get the idea that you don't actually _want_
to understand the problem; you just want the problem to go away. If
that is the case, and as long as that is the case, the problem will not
go away.
The users are writing from their feelings. Until you respond to those
feelings, you will get nowhere.
In summary, IF nearly every one of the developers responses included
some version of the following statement, nearly half of your "long
threads" would vanish and life would be good:
"We understand _____ presents a difficult situation for some
users and we regret the impact that this has had on you.
Unfortunately, we had to make difficult choices in the subject
of _______ and the result is that the program will no longer
fit the workflow of some users. We feel that the changes we
have made will be to the benefit of the majority of the user
community and we are dedicated to continuing the improvement
of Gimp for the target user community. We appreciate your
loyalty to Gimp and hope that you will find a way to adjust
your workflows so that Gimp's new behavior will work well
for you. Thank you for expressing your concern. Please know
that we have heard you, even if the changes we have had to make
are not favorable for you, and that we will continue to work
on improving the program to be the best that it can be for
the target user community."
You may think that you have said this thousands of times, but I have not
seen it. Bits and pieces of it had been said, but until you respond to
the FEELINGS people are having, every time, you won't get any change in
their behavior. Responding to the people with a repetition of the facts
without expressing any empathy for what they are going through will get
you nowhere.
I've got nothing more to contribute to this subject. Please don't feel
the need to reply, especially not if it is like the last reply.
Jay
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