On October 8, 2009, Vedran Furač wrote: > You already have 4 persons that would like > such feature and adding a hidden config somewhere in > ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-* would not "increase the config UI overhead" > so this is a non-issue. Do you have any other objections?
4 isn't a significant # when it comes from a self-selected group out of 10s of millions of users world wide. trying to turn a design issue into a popularity contest is also not useful. i won't knowingly diminish the software even if 100 people think doing so is the right idea. design can not be crowd sourced. input data to be considered in design certainly can be. but it can't be the hand that moves the proverbial pencil. directly to the issue: if we add a "hidden" configuration option we still pay for it in terms of maintenance of that feature, we have to make sure it doesn't conflict in future with other features (c.f. the "increase performance by making views opaque" change in 4.3 which ruined the (unintentional) feature of making it possible to configure things in a way that wallpapers drawn by other apps could be seen). if we repeat this process, we end up where any feature that doesn't fit the UI goes into a hidden section, the code gets increasingly hard to maintain and we will end up having feature conflicts at some point as well. i've bee down that path in the past with other software projects. including ones in kde3 (though not limited to that, either). learning from the past is a good way to improve one's future performances :) this is why i am extremely conservative about such feature additions. appealing to numbers of people or my "kinder, better sense" doesn't wash one bit. use cases with clear benefit/cost associated with them, published research and real world testing / field work are what we look for. this philosophy has allowed us to cram more features in Plasma than kicker of kdesktop ever had with room for many more and a code base that is actually manageable. i want us to be in that same kind of position in 10 years time. -- Aaron J. Seigo humru othro a kohnu se GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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