New devicenotifier moved to kdereview

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On October 4, 2009, Jacopo De Simoi wrote:
>  now, we believe that it is ready for merging into trunk. Of course we need
>  your feedback first, so grab it, try it out and tell us what you think!

i still don't see the need for either of the popup control options. why should 
we care how long it pops up?

i can think of two use cases for the "show pop up when device is inserted":

a) the user simply doesn't want that behaviour but still wants access to their 
devices

b) the user has set up the notifier to not display some devices and so doesn't 
want it popping up when those devices are inserted

(b) is probably easily done by simply not popping up the window if the device 
is hidden in it.

so the question is "is (a) worth supporting?" personally, i don't think so. 
the point of this thing is as a device *notifier*. it's not just a device 
*lister*.

so, there's the possibility that the user has more than one of these on their 
screen. why? because they've hidden some devices in one and others in another 
to "sort them out". in that case i can see why they may not want to have them 
all pop up when they plug a device in. so the whole "show only certain 
devices" feature no leads us to having people who want yet more features to 
deal with the side effects of that feature.

*sigh*

what's the bet that when we release this widget someone looks at the options 
and then requests "can i show only fixed devices?" it's something of a 
pandora's box that is being opened up with this set of options.

my suggestion is this:

turn the "show removable devices only" option into a combobox that offers 
three options: "Removable devices", "Non-removable devices", "All devices" and 
have it default to first one. the label could be "Show:"

remove both the popup control options and make the popup only happen when the 
device is actually to be shown in the notifier.

let's see if we get any significant feedback requesting popup controls with 
that. once we offer features we can't easily take them back, no matter how 
much pain they cause us. we can easily add features later, however, if it 
turns out they are really needed.

-- 
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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