unity-design team mailing list archive

[Martin Owens <doctormo@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2009-07-07 at 06:44 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> You know, classically, this was a GNOME vs KDE value, but I don't
> believe it is that any more. I've seen KDE folks increasingly aligned
> with this value too.

Yes, for front end user interaction I would always say that we should
select the best options as defaults and provide ways of changing the
most basic settings through the most basic of user interfaces.

But to claim that this also applies to code is odd, we don't want
complexity in code it's true. But nor should we be programming in
specifics. Even none expressed options that naturally occur in the
elegance of the design should be stored in configs as sensible defaults.

Then it's up to enterprising users to create the "Ultra complex,
reconfigurer" application that can express those options if really
needed, or for a sys admin to edit the default settings and see what
they do. This then allows for outside experimentation and the discovery
of new and more interesting ideal defaults.

Hopefully you didn't mean that we'd gladdy sacrifice elegance of code
and flexibility of programming structure in order to artificially
restrict the expressed options. Which is how I read your reply at first.

Regards, Martin Owens