[dev] gui and alike changes

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 08:19:34PM +0900, q0k wrote:
> Dear developers,
> 
> I want to contribute my idea: please make any change an option.
> 
> For example, you shouldn't make Yahoo the default search engine like
> you plan in 10.4
> (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2010-February/013860.html).
> Instead, you should pop out a dialogue: "which is your preferred
> search engine?" during or soon after the installation.

No, consider if every time there was a change in Ubuntu a dialog was
popped up to let the user choose the new or legacy version.  Swiftly the
installation would become a mess of dialogs.  google or yahoo?  ext3 or
ext4?  gnome or kde?  grey or brown UI?  vi or emacs?  ctrl+alt+bksp to
kill X or not?  want hal? want gimp?

Even aside from this (and I also prefer google over yahoo), I don't like
requiring the user to make choices during installation.  Making a choice
like this one may seem trivial to me and you, but requiring a user to
make a choice has a cost.  They have to stop and think.  They worry over
what the right decision is.  "Will installation break if I make a
non-default choice that might not have been tested well?  Can I change
their mind later?  If so, why do I have to make the choice now?  How
many more choices are there going to be?  Maybe this Ubuntu thing was a
bad idea, and I should go watch TV instead."  One of the things that
makes Ubuntu so well liked is how streamlined its installation process
is, and it got that way by making a lot of installation-time choices
(some quite controversial) for the user.

There is also a testing cost.  Ideally, testers want to test every path
that a user can take during the installation process.  Each time you add
a variable (even a simple on/off checkbox), it increases the amount of
paths that could be taken and that need tested.

> With any new change you make, please think where to place a check-box
> for it, especially when it is an edge case.

In this case there *is* included a simple mechanism for switching back
to google, and it's in an obvious spot which will be visible to the user
without even needing to dig through preferences dialogs.

That said, I do not think that *every* change to Ubuntu requires adding
a checkbox to the UI.  There is a limit to the amount of configurability
that is sensible.

Bryce