On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 11:08 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> Where "fringe case" is defined as "whatever I'm not doing" and "common
> case" is defined at as "the way I do it"?
Not at all. It is not always easy to figure out, but it's not all that
difficult either. There are untold number of cases where we put the
carriage before the horse so to speak:
* slower boot times for _everybody_ because of fringe cases like
when /usr is loaded from the network. Never mind that such
setups are run by technically savvy people that could be bothered
to flip a few switches.
* geditor opens an idiotic tab by default, and it's slow to load
because it's cool to have a "programming" editor. Never mind that
most people are non-programmers, and even those want to see files
quickly without programming. On a fast machine it takes sometimes
2-3 sec to load the darn thing, whereas it takes 250ms to load
notepad in wine!
I could go on. But the bottom line is that we sometimes make bad
decisions for "default" values (I guess because they are mostly
taken by people that are too technical).
And I'm sorry to say it, but for vast majority of cases "default"
should be "what people expect" and that usually means "what Windows
does". I know it sounds heretic, but that's the reality of it. Not that
we should be stuck there forever, but we should have really good
reasons to deviate, and when we do we should do it gently. Instead, we
do it a lot of times "on a whim", and that ends up hurting the end user.
--
Dimi Paun <dimi@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Lattica, Inc.
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