unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2012-02-29 at 18:41 +0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Mark Shuttleworth wrote on 29/02/12 07:53:
> > 
> > On 28/02/12 18:54, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> >> 
> >> The story of nick rundy's parents is an awkward one. But the only
> >> way to be sure that an Ubuntu, Mac, or Windows PC will log out or
> >> shut down safely is to wait a few seconds to answer any questions
> >> it asks after you choose that command. Developing and universally
> >> adopting a standard auto-save API, so that users never need to
> >> save documents manually, might solve much of that problem.
> >> Changing the design of the shutdown dialog would not.
> > 
> > We could, however, design the API and give developers one cycle to 
> > adopt it before making that behaviour the default. Updating the 
> > shutdown dialog to JFDI would make apps that don't support the API 
> > buggy.
>
> Then every Ubuntu app would be buggy indefinitely. Gnome had
> rudimentary session saving/restore APIs for years, they were never
> adopted reliably, and several default Ubuntu applications were never
> Gnome ones anyway.

While I don't disagree with the point you're making here, I think this
part is solvable.  I think that if we built easy to use test tools for
the feature, people would use them.  Most of this "advanced" technology
in OSS today doesn't have good test harnesses.  If we were going to (and
I think we should) decide on an API and really drive it forward I think
a significant part of that effort should be in ways to make it easy for
app developers to test, and for us to verify, that the feature works.

		--Ted

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