OPTIONS

[Dominic Fandrey]

On 03/10/2010 12:54, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> Dominic Fandrey wrote:
>> On 03/10/2010 11:45, David DEMELIER wrote:
>>> 2010/10/3 Matthew Seaman<m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk>:
>>> I don't want something complex, checkbox, textbox, radiobuttons is
>>> enough.
>>
>> Textbox is _very_ complex. Think of all the code you'd have to
>> add to ports to check what was entered by the user.
>> At the very least you have to verify that whatever was provided
>> is valid. For the feature not to become annoying you'd have to
>> be a lot more fuzzy and complex, though.
> 
> You don't need to. It is the same as if user put something wrong in to
> make.conf, ports.conf or even if somebody do:
> 
> cd /usr/ports/databases/mysql51-server
> make WITH_CHARSET=UTF13 WITH_XCHARSET=1 WITH_COLLATION=true

No, it's technically the same, but from a usability standpoint this
is entirely different.

In your examples a user makes an educated and competent change, the
user acted on his own behalf.

When you pop up a dialogue and ask the user for something you
better have a) a good reason, b) good defaults, c) give thorough
guidance and explanation and d) offer a way to roll back the
changes made.

Or you can kiss your users good bye.

> All of them are invalid and not checked by ports framework, so if
> somebody implements textbox in to OPTIONS framework, the situation will
> not be worse! Situation will be better for those users not familiar with
> WITH_XXXX knobs.

You're mistaking a usability issue with a technical one. Jef
Raskin's Humane Interface is a good starting point.

Regards

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