Building Safety Into Our Work

[Miguel Branco]

Hello all, great ideas here!

Regarding the safety issues:

I agree with the ideas posted so far, at least a warning at program startup
advising caution and a way to rollback setting changes.
I also agree that there should be a "rollback last changes", "rollback to
<date>" and "rollback to defaults".

I think the program should run as a GUI (as the mockup proposed) or a CLI
program, in the case you "accidentally" bork your X.
We could have some parameter like "-GUI" that went in the .desktop file, and
then when you run it without "-GUI" it behaves as every CLI program,
reminding you of the available options such as "-restoredefaults" and
"-restoredate" etc

Leveraging those features, I think this one should come in handy:

Use the program to run your settings script, instead of configuring every
setting by hand.
You don't have to know how each setting is implemented by each plugin, you
just export or manually write the list of settings and selected option and
then let the program apply them using the plugins.

As far as Ubuntu derivatives go, I think the problem is auto-solved by the
plugin nature of the Kitchen Sink, interested users can just develop their
plugin.

Also, I had the notion Ubuntu Tweak's target users were a bit different from
the Sink's. I'll install it right away and have a look at what they propose
as options.

So in practical terms what can we do right now? And by that I mean "How can
I help?"

Miguel Branco


On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 11:29, Brena Boba <brenaiboba at gmail.com> wrote:

> As far as the warning messages go, I think that message like the Firefox
> "i'll be careful I plomise" would be sufficient. Remember that power or any
> user for that matter first has to go googling around, find the "Sink"
> application, probably this group and is already hellbent on destroying his
> system. All we can do is try to implement help and rollback features in a
> way to make this destruction as benign as possible. Lot of nagging messages
> will just result in lot of angry "Ok, now piss off" clicks.
>
> Few years back I used a Linux system whose programmer had some sense of
> humor and in stream of messages which where "Ok" or "Cancel" he would insert
> some that were like "Ok. I now nobody reads these messages and you just
> click OK, so now you must do this math 24x2/5-1 and input the result to
> continue." :)
>
> Firefox example is also good if we want to think with the approach to make
> the more gconf/dconf tweak configs easier. Just a button click and "Default
> value" rollback button. But for any more sophisticated tweak that has a
> greater chance to do the destruction, maybe make a more
> "complicated" front-end that simply forces the tweaker to be more careful.Go
> firefox, about:conifg to see what I mean. In my experience in doing payed
> user support, even people that feel comfortable with their systems tend to
> stop and think before engaging with more complicated-looking setting
> managers.
>
> iv
>
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