Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Luca Ferretti]

2012/7/3 Jasper St. Pierre 

>
> You linked the same bug twice.
>
>
Doh, my bad. They was "Don't show a titlebar when maximized" and "Migrate
menu bar to a view menu button", but it seems both (and more) was reported
on the same bug.
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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Luca Ferretti]

2012/7/3 Luca Ferretti 

> 2012/7/2 Andreas Nilsson 
>
>>
>> And here is the same feature, but at the window manager level (and for
>> all the other apps too):
>> http://andreasn.myownb3.com/**temp/nau-side-by-side.png
>>
>>
> 
>

This is the latest available:
http://people.gnome.org/~lferrett/img/side-by-side.png
(and yes, the "fake split" of course works only in half-fullscreen
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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Jasper St. Pierre]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Luca Ferretti  wrote:
> 2012/7/2 Andreas Nilsson 
>>
>>
>> And here is the same feature, but at the window manager level (and for all
>> the other apps too):
>> http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/nau-side-by-side.png
>>
>
> Unfortunately this is already old :)
>
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676531
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679278
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676531
> -- or see http://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus

You linked the same bug twice.

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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Luca Ferretti]

2012/7/2 Andreas Nilsson 

>
> And here is the same feature, but at the window manager level (and for all
> the other apps too):
> http://andreasn.myownb3.com/**temp/nau-side-by-side.png
>
>
Unfortunately this is already old :)

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676531
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679278
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676531
-- or see http://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus
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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[John Stowers]

>
> And here is the same feature, but at the window manager level (and for all
> the other apps too):
> http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/nau-side-by-side.png
>
> Same thing, just on a different level and now desktop-wide.

Not quite.

With split planes

select complex combination of files with ctrl -> right click -> move
to other pane. Unless this feature appears nautilus wide (right click
-> move to ) this represents a
usability loss for me.

John
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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Dylan McCall]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Andreas Nilsson  wrote:
> For reference, here is the extra pane functionality in Nautilus:
> http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/nau-extra-pane.png
>
> And here is the same feature, but at the window manager level (and for all
> the other apps too):
> http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/nau-side-by-side.png
>
> Same thing, just on a different level and now desktop-wide.

Thanks for posting that. It's a really interesting comparison :)

There are just a few things we could do with split-view Nautilus that
we cannot (currently) do with the window manager:
1. Resize the two panes.
2. Do this with a movable, unmaximized window. (Eg: do this reasonably
on a large screen).
3. Enable split view with a single keystroke.

For #1, I think that is something the window manager could totally do.
Chrome OS currently does the same and it's been pretty well regarded,
and it can't be _that_ hard to implement. (Is it?).

#2 wouldn't be unheard of from a WM level, either, though it might be
a little tricky to get right. Haiku OS has a really interesting window
manager with this type of functionality:
http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/gui.html.

#3 is arguably not _too_ different here. You can get a split view with
Super+Left, Ctrl+N, and Super+R (for the new window). That isn't
discoverable, though, and it certainly won't be shown as "View extra
pane" in a nice menu somewhere.

So, I think your example shows where there's a good opportunity to
make the GNOME platform amazing to develop on. For a developer, it
would be brilliant to just get all kinds of view management features
for free after doing some basic multi-window stuff. (Android's
Fragments API is perhaps good inspiration here). But, as much as I
love the 'let the window manager take care of it' approach, right now
the user experience is losing out. Applications tend to be completely
subservient to the window manager, and the window manager knows very
little about applications. (Definitely improved in GNOME Shell, but
it's still fairly limited).

>From the WM level, I'm pretty sure we can't do F3 to get split
Nautilus windows in any reasonable way. (We don't know if an app will
support that, and we can't tell an app to open a window just like its
current one). But perhaps that be done with a helpful function in an
API somewhere. For any application where split view would make sense,
it could use that API call and tie it to a menu item with F3 as an
agreed-upon keyboard shortcut. So for the end user split view in
Nautilus could be initiated just like it is now, but for a developer
it would dead easy.

Okay, rambling over.

Dylan
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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Jason Simanek]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Jasper St. Pierre  wrote:
> This has been a part of GNOME since 3.2. Just drag the window to
> either side of the screen. In GNOME 3.4, you can hit Left, or
> Right.

Oh. So is this just fullscreen only? Yeah, that's not what I thought
you were showing me. I thought you were saying we would be able to
stick two windows to each other side-by-side.

If this feature is only available if the two windows in question cover
the entire desktop space, it's not very useful.

At this point, I have to ask: Is the new Gnome intended to be
laptop-only? For large desktop displays and multiple display
environments these kinds of use-case scenarios are completely
impractical.
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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Florian Müllner]

On Jul 2, 2012 11:52 PM, "Jasper St. Pierre"  wrote:
> This has been a part of GNOME since 3.2.

3.0 actually.

Florian
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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Federico Mena Quintero]

On Mon, 2012-07-02 at 16:03 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
> Federico Mena Quintero  wrote:
> ...
> > The anti-pattern for both removals is like, "there's some peeling paint
> > in this house - let's bulldoze the neighborhood".
> ...
> 
> How do you know that was the reason for the decision, if the
> background hasn't been explained? The anti-pattern for that statement
> is like, "assuming motivations out of ignorance".

Okay, that was a bad *analogy*.  I didn't assume motivation.  But
without an explanation of the motives, I can only infer - and this
smells to me like "I don't like how this feels; I have the power to
convince someone to remove the code, so I'll do that".  Maybe my
supposition is wrong, but you are not giving me much to work
from.  

I know Jon means well, but I'm inferring from the two cases I've seen
(bgo#676842, bgo#676897), where the only thing Jon said on a bug was, in
effect, "this doesn't work to my liking", and then proceeded to remove a
bunch of code for very concrete features.

> compact view is problematic, and I don't see any why we shouldn't
> remove UI if it isn't of sufficiently high quality. 

This is a very dangerous line to tread.  A *LOT* of our interface is not
as high-quality as someone with high standards would desire.  But we
can't remove big features just because they aren't up to someone's
standards.  We should improve them instead until they are palatable, or
we should make them superfluous when there is a better way of doing what
they do and with a good transition path.

Adam's concrete requirements are something like:

1. Need to browse lots of files.
2. Care more about the names than the icons.
3. Don't care about file metadata very much (superfluous detail).

And in the thread he started in nautilus-list, he provided *evidence*
that the other remaining views don't meet those requirements and thus
are harder for him to use.  At least he provided a thorough explanation.

I'm all for code cleanups, UI cleanups, and anything that can improve
our state of affairs.  Forgive me for using a strong word, but
destroying working functionality without explaining exactly what made it
bad, and without trying to fix it first, is just vandalism.

  Federico


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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Jasper St. Pierre]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 5:49 PM, Jason Simanek  wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 4:12 PM, Andreas Nilsson  wrote:
>> And here is the same feature, but at the window manager level (and for all
>> the other apps too):
>> http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/nau-side-by-side.png
>>
>> Same thing, just on a different level and now desktop-wide.
>
> OK. All windows will be able to do that? That's awesome.

This has been a part of GNOME since 3.2. Just drag the window to
either side of the screen. In GNOME 3.4, you can hit Left, or
Right.

> A slightly edited quote from Pulp Fiction seems appropriate: “You
> called The Wolf? That’s all you had to say!”
>
> Well done and thank you!
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-- 
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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Jason Simanek]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 4:12 PM, Andreas Nilsson  wrote:
> And here is the same feature, but at the window manager level (and for all
> the other apps too):
> http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/nau-side-by-side.png
>
> Same thing, just on a different level and now desktop-wide.

OK. All windows will be able to do that? That's awesome.

A slightly edited quote from Pulp Fiction seems appropriate: “You
called The Wolf? That’s all you had to say!”

Well done and thank you!
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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Andreas Nilsson]

On 07/02/2012 10:34 PM, Holger Berndt wrote:

I was baffled to see the extra pane feature from Nautilus
silently removed.

The story of this feature has a lot to do with communication and
respect, and sadly enough, this mail is an addendum to other recent
and not-so-recent topics on this list - so it fits better here than on
Nautilus' ML.
(I did read your entire e-mail and agree that a heads up on big ui 
changes are a good thing, but I just wanted to add an angle on the 
things-are-going-away-and-this-is-the-apocalypse-discussion)


For reference, here is the extra pane functionality in Nautilus:
http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/nau-extra-pane.png

And here is the same feature, but at the window manager level (and for 
all the other apps too):

http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/nau-side-by-side.png

Same thing, just on a different level and now desktop-wide.

I wanted to talk about this on Nautilus-list really, and all respect to 
the former and current Nautilus maintainers, but that app have become 
really, really weird in the last couple of releases with a lot of odd 
bugs surrounding the many different view modes and especially the 
combination of them. I'm happy someone have started looking into 
untangling that.

- Andreas
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Re: Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Jason Simanek]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Holger Berndt  wrote:
> But now that the design team managed to remove this feature after all,
> silently, without a remotely comparable public discussion like it
> underwent before going in, I wonder if that's the way the GNOME community
> really wants to work and treat one another.

But we JUST GOT the long-awaited split-view feature. And it's so
useful. And now you've removed it?

Say it ain’t so!
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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Juanjo Marín]

- Mensaje original -
> De: Allan Day 
> Para: Federico Mena Quintero 
> CC: desktop-devel-list@gnome.org
> Enviado: Lunes 2 de julio de 2012 17:03
> Asunto: Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)
> 
> Federico Mena Quintero  wrote:
> ...
>>  The anti-pattern for both removals is like, "there's some peeling 
> paint
>>  in this house - let's bulldoze the neighborhood".
> ...
> 
> How do you know that was the reason for the decision, if the
> background hasn't been explained? The anti-pattern for that statement
> is like, "assuming motivations out of ignorance".
> 

That's the point of this thread, some decisions are taken and people make 
assumptions about the reasons behind based on the scarce info available.

I think we must find a better way of communicating these changes. It is a 
difficult problem to address because designing GNOME by comittee doesn't work 
and we really need the leadership and expertise of the design team to reach a 
good user experience. But on the other hand, without properly communication, we 
lose the opportunity to develop a design pattern language in the GNOME 
community.

I'm sorry for just point what I think that it is a problem without suggesting a 
defintive solution. I think Allan posts are very good explaining the design 
concepts and the new designs. Maybe this is the way to go.

Cheers,

 -- Juanjo Marin

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Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Holger Berndt]

I was baffled to see the extra pane feature from Nautilus
silently removed.

The story of this feature has a lot to do with communication and
respect, and sadly enough, this mail is an addendum to other recent
and not-so-recent topics on this list - so it fits better here than on
Nautilus' ML.

I always wanted a split-view mode in Nautilus, so some time ago I did
a design and proposed a patch on the nautilus mailing list. Various
aspects were discussed, ranging from "Why is this useful?" to
implementation details. After a few discussion / redesign loop iterations
during the following 10 months it was finally merged and anounced in
GNOME's 2.30 release notes. Many reviews of that release mentioned that
feature prominently and favorably, and I got lots of positive user
feedback.

What also came along was my first encounter with the design team - and
it was not a pleasant one. Interestingly, it only took place _after_ all
discussions and after the merge.

Appearantly, they had a UX hackfest. That they didn't follow the
discussion was pretty obvious (as certain false claims that they
repeated were in fact discussed), but that didn't stop them to post
their "results" on Planet GNOME-aggregated blogs.

I wouldn't treat contributors that I don't know personally like that -
but hey, I guess name-calling their work as "total crack rock" is just how
the internet works.

However, if people spread accusations like "messy code - extra pain" on
a widely visible forum like planet GNOME [1] and don't answer my
repeated questions what's messy about it then that's not a discussion
anymore. It's also not criticism. It's outright slander.

But hey, I wasn't bitter. I thought "Talk is cheap, show me the code".

But now that the design team managed to remove this feature after all,
silently, without a remotely comparable public discussion like it
underwent before going in, I wonder if that's the way the GNOME community
really wants to work and treat one another.

Holger

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/4382707014/in/set-72157623492365266/
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Re: bumping the pulseaudio requirement

[Matthias Clasen]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Matthias Clasen
 wrote:

>
> But we do have pulseaudio in the modulesets, and build it in jhbuild.
> So maybe this is not that big of an issue ?

Subsequent irc discussion on #release-team ended with the conclusion
that it is probably fine to bump the requirement.
So I am going to change the 3.6 module sets to build pa 2.0.
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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Adam Dingle]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 8:03 AM, Allan Day  wrote:
Federico Mena Quintero wrote: 
.. 
> The anti-pattern for both removals is like, "there's some peeling paint 
> in this house - let's bulldoze the neighborhood". 
.. 

How do you know that was the reason for the decision, if the 
background hasn't been explained? The anti-pattern for that statement 
is like, "assuming motivations out of ignorance". 

I'll let Jon speak for himself. However, I can at least give you my 
personal design opinion on the issue. First of all, I do think that 
compact view is problematic, and I don't see any why we shouldn't 
remove UI if it isn't of sufficiently high quality. Some issues with 
compact view: 

* Horizontal scrolling is unergonomic with mouse and touchpad input 
* It is hard to scan multiple columns when they scroll, and it is 
difficult to find a particular item in an alphabetical list if it 
wraps over multiple columns 
* Filenames have a tendency to become truncated, and filenames also 
disappear off the side of the screen. 

The other reason why I think it is good to remove compact view is that 
it is inelegant as a solution to users' needs. List and icon view have 
clear roles and are easy to communicate to users. Grid view 
prioritises visual representation of files. List view focuses on 
finding my name. With these two options we offer a clear and 
straightforward choice. 

Compact view doesn't fit neatly into our existing functionality. It 
overlaps with the list view (since it focuses on finding by name), yet 
it misses some of its advantages (such as the ability to easily 
reorder the list). It also overlaps with zoom, which is the standard 
way to display more items at once. 

I'd much rather offer two, clearly differentiated views that work 
well, rather than have three poorly distinguished options, 
particularly when one of them has serious usability issues. 

Allan, thanks for your thoughts.  I've responded on a new thread on 
nautilus-list, which seems like a good place to continue this discussion:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2012-July/msg5.html

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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Luca Ferretti]

2012/7/2 Allan Day 
>
>
> Jon has been doing some fantastic work on Nautilus recently. It was
> getting very little - if any - developer attention and he has stepped
> up to make dramatic improvements, including addressing long-standing
> complaints. I'm really excited about the next release of Nautilus
> thanks to his work; instead of having no movement whatsoever, we are
> going to have lots of great improvements to talk about.
>

Are you sure? Many basic and long standing nautilus features was removed in
the last weeks. I wonder what people inside and outside GNOME will say when
they will see, for example, those changes:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus/commit/?id=ef467c8775392d0f0feb0e38f7a80f2d41719d84
http://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus/commit/?id=b8d5b4a7bcf47ed34a6343c95bcc3b079255c0a0
http://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus/commit/?id=331860440c50a979bcbeafa401d48490c758db5a

IMHO cheering the new streamlined nautilus _after_ all unwanted feature
will be removed is not a smart marketing strategy. I fear you can't simply
say "the new nautilus is great, our developers did a great works" and hope
nobody (community members, users, bloggers, journalists and so on) will
complain.

Moreover as a GNOME community member I would prefer to know the reasons of
major changes happening in GNOME (I repeat, major: and if you sum up all
small removal happened in nautilus you'll have a huge change between 3.4
and 3.6) for a simple and trivial reasons: when people know I'm a GNOME
member, then ask me "why GNOME did this? and that? why I can't do this
anymore?". Simply replying "by design" is alienating to me :/
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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Allan Day]

Federico Mena Quintero  wrote:
...
> The anti-pattern for both removals is like, "there's some peeling paint
> in this house - let's bulldoze the neighborhood".
...

How do you know that was the reason for the decision, if the
background hasn't been explained? The anti-pattern for that statement
is like, "assuming motivations out of ignorance".

I'll let Jon speak for himself. However, I can at least give you my
personal design opinion on the issue. First of all, I do think that
compact view is problematic, and I don't see any why we shouldn't
remove UI if it isn't of sufficiently high quality. Some issues with
compact view:

 * Horizontal scrolling is unergonomic with mouse and touchpad input
 * It is hard to scan multiple columns when they scroll, and it is
difficult to find a particular item in an alphabetical list if it
wraps over multiple columns
 * Filenames have a tendency to become truncated, and filenames also
disappear off the side of the screen.

The other reason why I think it is good to remove compact view is that
it is inelegant as a solution to users' needs. List and icon view have
clear roles and are easy to communicate to users. Grid view
prioritises visual representation of files. List view focuses on
finding my name. With these two options we offer a clear and
straightforward choice.

Compact view doesn't fit neatly into our existing functionality. It
overlaps with the list view (since it focuses on finding by name), yet
it misses some of its advantages (such as the ability to easily
reorder the list). It also overlaps with zoom, which is the standard
way to display more items at once.

I'd much rather offer two, clearly differentiated views that work
well, rather than have three poorly distinguished options,
particularly when one of them has serious usability issues.

Allan
--
IRC:  aday on irc.gnome.org
Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Olav Vitters]

On Mon, Jul 02, 2012 at 09:38:36AM +0100, Allan Day wrote:
> Adam, if you wanted to discuss this change, you could have done so on
> the bug or on the Nautilus mailing list, or by asking on
> #gnome-design. I would have been happy to have given you some
> background on why the decision was made.

FWIW, I see nothing wrong with using desktop-devel-list. Bugzilla is not
meant for general discussions. For discussing technicalities, cool, but
detailed discussion should be held elsewhere. A quick "why was this
done" is more or less the limit of Bugzilla.

Believe nobody does any harm on purpose, but seems people quickly notice
changes. Way quicker than that they're explained.

I'd just like my rubber band selection to work :P

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Federico Mena Quintero]

On Sat, 2012-06-30 at 16:20 -0007, Adam Dingle wrote:

> The features in core GNOME apps are the result of years of hard work
> and consensus building by our community.  All I ask is to be informed
> before these features vanish and to be given the chance to say why I
> like them so much.

The directory tree sidebar was removed recently as well:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676897

Again, no real explanation was given as to why it was removed.  It may
not be the most commonly used feature, but it allows Nautilus to work
like Windows Explorer (a plus for many people, I'm sure), and it is one
of the best ways to organize a bunch of files - drag them to various
places in the tree, without opening tons of tabs and windows.

The anti-pattern for both removals is like, "there's some peeling paint
in this house - let's bulldoze the neighborhood".

I wholly agree with you that these big removals need to be discussed.
It could have gone like,

"I don't like horizontal scrolling in the compact view.  It's like icon
view with labels on the side, anyway."

"No, not really - in icon view the labels wrap and columns are all the
same size, which make the list hard to read."

"Oh, you are right.  Here's the short patch to fix that."

"And what was the problem with horizontal scrolling, anyway?"

"..."

  Federico

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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Emily Gonyer]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 4:38 AM, Allan Day  wrote:
> Adam Dingle  wrote:
>> I realized recently to my surprise and dismay that the compact view has been
>> removed from Nautilus:
>
> Adam, if you wanted to discuss this change, you could have done so on
> the bug or on the Nautilus mailing list, or by asking on
> #gnome-design. I would have been happy to have given you some
> background on why the decision was made.
>
> Jon has been doing some fantastic work on Nautilus recently. It was
> getting very little - if any - developer attention and he has stepped
> up to make dramatic improvements, including addressing long-standing
> complaints. I'm really excited about the next release of Nautilus
> thanks to his work; instead of having no movement whatsoever, we are
> going to have lots of great improvements to talk about.
>
> There has been a bunch of discussion around these changes. Not the
> mailing list approach that you seem to want, but the existing Nautilus
> maintainers have been involved and a range of design people have been
> consulted. I personally agreed with removing compact view - I think
> it's a good change.
>
> ...
>> I'd like to end on a constructive note.  I propose that GNOME adopt the
>> following policy.  No major feature will be removed from a core GNOME
>> application before a discussion has occurred on a public mailing list such
>> as this one (or on a Bugzilla bug, with a prominent mailing list
>> announcement pointing to the bug in question).  I also propose that all such
>> feature removals that have occurred in the 3.6 development cycle be reverted
>> until such discussion has occured .
>
> I strongly disagree with that suggestion. I don't think it would be
> workable, and I don't think it would make GNOME a better place to
> work. There is still time to discuss changes that have been made; we
> don't need to wrap ourselves up in policies.
>
>> The features in core GNOME apps are the result of years of hard work and
>> consensus building by our community.
> ...
>
> There is no consensus. There are features that some people have gotten
> used to, and there has been a long period of adding features without
> considering how they fit into the whole.
>
> No one objects when you add a feature, yet features can ruin a design
> if you keep adding them. Nautilus has been at saturation point for a
> while; it's at the stage where it's actually very difficult to improve
> it without taking something away.
>
> Allan
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> Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
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Then I guess the question becomes how we can involve the greater GNOME
 community in these sorts of decisions. Existing designers and
 developers may have been consulted, but they are not the only ones
 affected. The choices that a handful of people are making affect
 everyone who uses GNOME, though the community is rarely consulted or
 even notified until the change has been made and all but finalized. I
 suspect that I am not the only one disturbed and disappointed by what
 seem like rapid changes to existing projects without public
 discussion. If there was discussion regarding the removal of compact
 view and later icon mode with text, I'd like to know when and where it
 occurred as well as when and where I should keep an eye out for future
 changes and removals.

 As I understand it (and I'm rather new to the development community,
 so I may be wrong), adding features, new modules, etc to GNOME is an
 often lengthy (and perhaps more importantly, transparent) process of
 proposal, review, design and re-design, which seems proper. It serves
 to keep GNOME running smoothly and the community at large involved in
 development. Unfortunately though, the process for removing features
 doesn't appear to be nearly as robust and/or transparent.

 A handful of developers and/or designers talk amongst themselves and
 decide to remove features without consulting the community at large.
 As a result changes like the ones above occur rapidly over an hour or
 perhaps a day, without any sort of public discussion or even
 notification (aside from postings on bugzilla and git, which
 apparently occur after discussion). And then on release day we are
 surprised that feature XYZ has been removed. Since the removal
 occurred a month or more back, we are told that we had ample time to
 disagree and since we failed to do so, tough luck. However, since the
 removals are done quietly without so much as a blog posting this seems
 disingenuous at best - even when posters replied within a few hours
 [1] to the change on bugzilla, they were all but ignored (at least
 publicly) by those affecting the change.

 I have long been under the impression that since GNOME is a free
 software project, development is (or at least should be) done in a
 public, transpare

Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Adam Dingle]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Allan Day  wrote:

> Adam Dingle  wrote:
> > I realized recently to my surprise and dismay that the compact view has
> been
> > removed from Nautilus:
>
> Adam, if you wanted to discuss this change, you could have done so on
> the bug or on the Nautilus mailing list, or by asking on
> #gnome-design. I would have been happy to have given you some
> background on why the decision was made.
>
> Jon has been doing some fantastic work on Nautilus recently. It was
> getting very little - if any - developer attention and he has stepped
> up to make dramatic improvements, including addressing long-standing
> complaints. I'm really excited about the next release of Nautilus
> thanks to his work; instead of having no movement whatsoever, we are
> going to have lots of great improvements to talk about.
>
> There has been a bunch of discussion around these changes. Not the
> mailing list approach that you seem to want, but the existing Nautilus
> maintainers have been involved and a range of design people have been
> consulted. I personally agreed with removing compact view - I think
> it's a good change.
>
> ...
> > I'd like to end on a constructive note.  I propose that GNOME adopt the
> > following policy.  No major feature will be removed from a core GNOME
> > application before a discussion has occurred on a public mailing list
> such
> > as this one (or on a Bugzilla bug, with a prominent mailing list
> > announcement pointing to the bug in question).  I also propose that all
> such
> > feature removals that have occurred in the 3.6 development cycle be
> reverted
> > until such discussion has occured .
>
> I strongly disagree with that suggestion. I don't think it would be
> workable, and I don't think it would make GNOME a better place to
> work. There is still time to discuss changes that have been made; we
> don't need to wrap ourselves up in policies.


Allan,

thanks for your level-headed response.  In retrospect, I think the tone of
my original post was too dramatic.  I got upset when I saw a longstanding
favorite feature disappear and I made some sweeping suggestions that may
have gone too far.  I apologize for the dramatic tone and will avoid it in
the future.

I remain seriously concerned that removing Nautilus's compact view was a
mistake, but as you have and others have pointed out this is not really the
right place to discuss that.  I'll begin a discussion on the Nautilus
mailing list and will look forward to discussing this more there.

More broadly, I also remain concerned that large changes are being made to
core GNOME apps by a small set of people (basically the design team plus
the maintainers of those apps) without enough input or feedback from users
of those apps.  You're probably right that a sweeping policy change is not
the way to address this.  But I do think it's a problem that needs to be
addressed.

adam
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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Emmanuel Pacaud]

Le lundi 02 juillet 2012 à 09:38 +0100, Allan Day a écrit :
> Adam Dingle  wrote:
> > I realized recently to my surprise and dismay that the compact view has been
> > removed from Nautilus:
> 
> Adam, if you wanted to discuss this change, you could have done so on
> the bug or on the Nautilus mailing list, or by asking on
> #gnome-design. I would have been happy to have given you some
> background on why the decision was made.

Adam already answered to this point:

"I'm well aware of nautilus-list, but chose to post here because I think
there's a problem here beyond just Nautilus.  In my opinion, useful
features are vanishing from core GNOME apps without adequate notice to
the community and opportunity for discussion by people who use those
features regularly."

> No one objects when you add a feature, yet features can ruin a design
> if you keep adding them. Nautilus has been at saturation point for a
> while; it's at the stage where it's actually very difficult to improve
> it without taking something away.

I don't use the compact view, but what worries me is, after several
messages on this list, there is still no justification for this removal,
except the one in the bug report:
 
"There is really little difference between compact mode and icon mode
with labels on the side. Well, except for that that horrible horizontal
scrolling."

That's a bit too short for an explanation (with the fact that the icon
mode with labels on the side is also removed). While I agree removal are
sometimes necessary, there is a good chance it will be seen as a
regression by some users, which should be well explained.

Emmanuel.

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Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Allan Day]

Adam Dingle  wrote:
> I realized recently to my surprise and dismay that the compact view has been
> removed from Nautilus:

Adam, if you wanted to discuss this change, you could have done so on
the bug or on the Nautilus mailing list, or by asking on
#gnome-design. I would have been happy to have given you some
background on why the decision was made.

Jon has been doing some fantastic work on Nautilus recently. It was
getting very little - if any - developer attention and he has stepped
up to make dramatic improvements, including addressing long-standing
complaints. I'm really excited about the next release of Nautilus
thanks to his work; instead of having no movement whatsoever, we are
going to have lots of great improvements to talk about.

There has been a bunch of discussion around these changes. Not the
mailing list approach that you seem to want, but the existing Nautilus
maintainers have been involved and a range of design people have been
consulted. I personally agreed with removing compact view - I think
it's a good change.

...
> I'd like to end on a constructive note.  I propose that GNOME adopt the
> following policy.  No major feature will be removed from a core GNOME
> application before a discussion has occurred on a public mailing list such
> as this one (or on a Bugzilla bug, with a prominent mailing list
> announcement pointing to the bug in question).  I also propose that all such
> feature removals that have occurred in the 3.6 development cycle be reverted
> until such discussion has occured .

I strongly disagree with that suggestion. I don't think it would be
workable, and I don't think it would make GNOME a better place to
work. There is still time to discuss changes that have been made; we
don't need to wrap ourselves up in policies.

> The features in core GNOME apps are the result of years of hard work and
> consensus building by our community.
...

There is no consensus. There are features that some people have gotten
used to, and there has been a long period of adding features without
considering how they fit into the whole.

No one objects when you add a feature, yet features can ruin a design
if you keep adding them. Nautilus has been at saturation point for a
while; it's at the stage where it's actually very difficult to improve
it without taking something away.

Allan
--
IRC:  aday on irc.gnome.org
Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
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