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Re: Little things make the initial install experience painful



On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 01:30:44PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Steve Langasek wrote:
> > Yes, I thought it might be an aid to developers, if the version of
> > debconf in testing/unstable displayed this information.  Even if just a
> > few of the most commonly used UIs supported it, I'm sure we'd start to
> > see the benefits.

> I'll try to cobble something together. If someone who is familiar with
> the gnome ui would like to find a set of 4 small icons, that somehow
> indicate the priorities low, medium, high, and critical I'd appreciate
> it.

I really think it's better to present the priorities textually -- having
to figure out icons reduces the number of eyeballs helping us look for
priority bugs.  As I think this is a feature that belongs only in
development versions of debconf, it seems that this should be a
principal goal.

> > Another thing that I feel is missing is a set of clear guidelines
> > describing how each of the debconf priorities should be used.  I have my
> > own ideas about this, which may or may not agree with the ideas of the
> > debconf author and certainly don't agree with current practices within
> > Debian.  If such a set of guidelines does exist, clearly I'm unaware of
> > their existence -- which means, IMHO, that they haven't been announced
> > as prominently as they should be.

> Well, there is the documented guidelines, from debconf-devel(8):

>               The  priority  field tells debconf how important it
>               is that this question be shown  to  the  user.  The
>               priority values are:
> 
>               low    Very  trivial  items that have defaults that
>                      will work in the  vast  majority  of  cases;
>                      only control freaks see these.
> 
>               medium Normal  items that have reasonable defaults.
> 
>               high   Items that don't have a reasonable  default.
> 
>               critical
>                      Items  that  will  probably break the system
>                      without user intervention.

Ah, must be where I got the idea, then. ;)

So then the question is, do debconf'ing developers not understand this
passage, or do they not read it?

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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