Panel autohide

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On October 8, 2009, Vedran Furač wrote:
> You already have 4 persons that would like
> such feature and adding a hidden config somewhere in
> ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-* would not "increase the config UI overhead"
> so this is a non-issue. Do you have any other objections?

4 isn't a significant # when it comes from a self-selected group out of 10s of 
millions of users world wide. trying to turn a design issue into a popularity 
contest is also not useful. i won't knowingly diminish the software even if 
100 people think doing so is the right idea.

design can not be crowd sourced. input data to be considered in design 
certainly can be. but it can't be the hand that moves the proverbial pencil.

directly to the issue: if we add a "hidden" configuration option we still pay 
for it in terms of maintenance of that feature, we have to make sure it 
doesn't conflict in future with other features (c.f. the "increase performance 
by making views opaque" change in 4.3 which ruined the (unintentional) feature 
of making it possible to configure things in a way that wallpapers drawn by 
other apps could be seen).

if we repeat this process, we end up where any feature that doesn't fit the UI 
goes into a hidden section, the code gets increasingly hard to maintain and we 
will end up having feature conflicts at some point as well.

i've bee down that path in the past with other software projects. including 
ones in kde3 (though not limited to that, either). learning from the past is a 
good way to improve one's future performances :)

this is why i am extremely conservative about such feature additions. 
appealing to numbers of people or my "kinder, better sense" doesn't wash one 
bit. use cases with clear benefit/cost associated with them, published 
research and real world testing / field work are what we look for.

this philosophy has allowed us to cram more features in Plasma than kicker of 
kdesktop ever had with room for many more and a code base that is actually 
manageable. i want us to be in that same kind of position in 10 years time.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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