Raymond on poor usability of CUPS

[Datschge]

> There is a very interesting article from Eric Raymond about the poor
> usability of CUPS (and OSS in general):
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

This paper is way too long and contains way too many curses it to be able to 
make a point for me. Also the suggestions at the end of it could be more 
straight forward than the intricated ones esr offers.

> Still, it does not really say how to make it (CUPS) more usable.

Actually he does, the most informative part of the page is paragraph six, the 
rest is way more rambling than informative tho. I quote said paragraph:

"Now, those of you who are initimate with CUPS know I have already made a 
basic error. I shouldn't be trying to create a new print queue on snark and 
then glue it to the server on minx, at all. Instead, if I want to pass print 
jobs to minx, I should look at the configuration wizard, see minx's print 
queue already announced there, and make it snark's default. But nothing in 
the configuration wizard's interface even hints at that! And minx's print 
queue does not show, for a reason we'll discover later in this sorry saga."

The best way to check out if a specific procedure is intuitive and 
userfriendly is, in my opinion, making a step-by-step how-to about how to 
activate/make use of a specific feature. This allows others to reproduce the 
steps easily and also to quickly pinpoint possible problems. The above 
example by esr shows how the first step in a wizard (which should hold the 
user's hands) is already unclear. Something which showed to me that making 
step-by-step descriptions are good is 
http://dot.kde.org/1074527533/1074807264/ , the last step I describe there 
has imo wrongly worded settings and is not intuitive at all (reasoning: after 
I added a menu to a panel already, why should I still need to tweak another 
option at another place to make it actually show a menu?).

> I will later today post a draft of a portal which should bring usability
> and OSS development together.

I agree with everything you wrote in the PDF. What I feel is important is that 
the usability reports, regardless whether from experts or not, have a high 
standard from the very beginning and discussion is limited to those, so that 
the portal doesn't end up just duplicating the often diverging wide ranging 
high volume discussions we see elsewhere. The one report already on 
openusability.org is perfectly fine in that regard. =) Will other existing 
reports also added there soon?

Cheers, Datschge

PS: this list seems not to be actually moderated, I would prefer to see all 
the off topic responses being redirected to kde-usability (- a fine draft as 
a perfectly fine PDF, and the first response is bitching about the choice of 
format instead comments about the draft itself?).