[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME (original) (raw)

Linus Torvalds torvalds at linux-foundation.org
Wed Feb 21 08:10:01 PST 2007

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Calum Benson wrote:

GNOME has plenty of settings you can lock down to stop people getting into a mess; if you maintain their machines, did you ever consider doing any of this for their accounts? If not, was it lack of an obvious way to do so (during installation or elsewhere) that prevented you from doing so, or some other reason?

I had (and still have) no idea.

I think Gnome people have this very strange dichotomy:

and then they think that just because you're an expert in one thing, it means that you should know Gnome intimately.

In past discussions, I've seen people think that since I'm a "developer", I should use a text-editor to edit binary configuration files by hand (and anybody who calls XML "text" has drunk a bit too much of the cool-aid).

I don't understand that. I'm a kernel developer. I may do kernel configuration by editing text-files (and they are real text files), because I find that to be more efficient, and I know the options better than most.

But do I think that Gnome developers should do that? Hell no. It's why we've merged various graphical configuration utilities that have help-buttons etc (and don't get me wrong: I don't think those are perfect either, and we had a small flame-war about how to make it easier for people to see dependencies between different choices just in the last month).

This is why you want graphical tools (that are there by default, so that you don't have to know enough even to know to get them) to configure stuff even for "experts". Because I'm an expert Unix user, but that doesn't mean that I'm expert in some Gnome internal configuration issues. I know what I want, but that doesn't mean that I know how Gnome does it.

This is also why I actually made the patches to "gnome-control-center" to expose the things I wanted in the window control panel. Not because I personally needed it any more (now that I wrote the code, I know which magic command line to use to enable it), but because I know that even I will forget - I tend to install new machines maybe twice a year, which is the only time I really want to configure my window manager, and that's simply not often enough for me to have to "remember" things.

And yeah, the control-center patches actually ended up being larger than the metacity patches (the biggest part was the Glade XML thing, btw: there really is something seriously wrong with XML, but that's a whole other discussion in itself). But I believe that to make a configuration option really "exist", you have to expose it. Not hide it away for "experts".

Linus' law (nr 76 of 271): "Don't claim to have a config option, if you don't actually have the UI to change it"

Because it really does boil down to the same "users are different, and do things we don't expect". Replace "users" with "experts", and it will still be true - perhaps even more so. Nobody is an expert on the thing you are an expert on.

Or perhaps lockdown stuff is too fine-grained for your scenario anyway, in which case, would something more like OSX's "parental controls" (sucky name) be more appropriate?

Quite frankly, I gave my daughter as an example just of the kind of "yeah, you can certainly do confusing things even with gnome". I don't feel like I need to control her in this area - confusion and experimentation is how people learn. I just realize that others may not be as happy having the people they support experiment and screw things up.

So I don't personally think that "parental controls" are necessarily the thing to look for, but yes, I think that kind of technology can also be used for "limit confusion by limiting choice". Some people are just better off not being confused.

    Linus

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