[Sugar-devel] rethinking your icon customization patch

[Walter Bender]

I agree that the technical solution we have come up with to a large
extent obviates the need for consensus around whether or not to
implement this feature as it pushes it to the user space in the from
of an activity. (Gonzalo and I have been discussing the fact that
other cpsection widgets could also be moved to activities, but that is
for another day.

Regarding the specifics of this feature, I have not found any of the
arguments that this feature is somehow going to confuse our users even
remotely convincing. Three observations: (1) any change to the icon is
driven by explicit user action, so no surprises there; (2) in
virtually every other system or service our users encounter, there is
the ability to set a personal avatar, so to argue that this is somehow
going to confuse them in Sugar seems a stretch; and (3) particularly
in light of the new approach, making it easier for our end users to
make modifications to the system is in keeping with our overall
pedagogy -- moving away from requiring root access to make changes is
a good thing and while we don't want our users to inadvertently break
things irreparably, there is something to be said for learning from
the experience of breaking things. Bottom line, I seem to have more
faith in the abilities of our users than perhaps is warranted, but I
think that is aligned with our goals to encourage our users to take
change. (The fact that this feature comes from one of our users says a
lot.)

Regarding our broken decision-making process, the problem I have is
less that we don't reach consensus than that the discussions are
happening very late in the process. We had, for example, had an email
from our release manager months ago about the features proposed for
this release. That was the time to question whether or not this
feature should be accepted. To wait until now is not fair to the
person, in the case, Ignacio, who has been working hard on his
implementation. It is fine to give technical criticism at this point,
and I think that discussion has been fruitful, but in my opinion, we
really need to be more forthcoming earlier in the process about the
features themselves.

regards.

-walter

On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 6:16 AM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, 20 June 2013, Simon Schampijer wrote:
>>
>> This thread is about the technical solving of the issue, did we agree on
>> making this change, really? I am not at all convinced.
>
>
> The technical solution proposed here has pretty strong implications on the
> feature though. It becomes completely optional being an activity. That might
> affect our decision on making the change or not.
>
> We do have a problem agreeing on changes. Most of the time the outcome of
> these threads it's at best unclear. We can always rely on maintainers making
> the final decision, but it would be nice if we was able to build consensus
> instead.
>
>> What do people think about my proposal with adding a picture/drawing per
>> kid that is part of the Palette then? We can see if we want to transfer this
>> compressed to the other users to have that available in the neighborhood
>> views. But we would have the same issue with the modified icon that is
>> proposed here.
>
>
> Will kids care about customising something which is hidden most of the time?
>
>
> --
> Daniel Narvaez
>
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org