Re: Little things make the initial install experience painful
On Thu, 2002-06-20 at 16:20, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > 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.
>
> So then the question is, do debconf'ing developers not understand this
> passage, or do they not read it?
'Don't understand' is almost certainly the cause in most of the cases, I
imagine. The average developer just doesn't have a very great idea of
what the user wants; it takes a user to say that.
>From my experience, the tendency is to prompt for most things, even
those things that are just informational or are clearly run-time issues.
Packagers' primary goal, IMO, should be to create a package which has a
reasonable and working set of defaults wherever possible, prompting
where it isn't possible (or when it is more beneficial to ask the user).
Unfortunately we (and I include myself in this) generally try to make it
so that everything can be controlled from debconf, leading only to
annoyed and/or confused users.
A good set of guidelines (which would be applicable not only to debconf
questions) would go a long way. UI design isn't easy.
--
Joe Drew <hoserhead@woot.net> <drew@debian.org>
Please encrypt email sent to me.
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