Preferences

[Christian Stimming]

Chris Lyttle schrieb:
> On Mon, 2003-05-12 at 14:05, Terry Boldt wrote:
> 
>>I reread Derek Atkins' reply to my email and another statement stood out for 
>>me:
>>
>>>In general, preferences are bad.  The fact remains that there is
>>>already a way to do what you want; the fact you don't like it is
>>>reegrettable.
>>
>>I had always considered it exactly the opposite, that "preferences" are highly 
>>desirable. Without preferences, the user is "stuck" with doing everything 
>>exactly the way that the developer says things should be done. Now that 
>>assumes that the developer knows absolutely the best way to do things for 
>>absolutely every user. 

Gee. This is almost the GNOME vs. KDE discussion, where the GNOME guys 
lean hard on the side "preference are always bad" and the KDE guys push 
towards "preferences are always good". Can we please not have that 
childish discussion here? Of course there are cases where preferences 
are good, and other cases where preferences are bad, both inside the 
same project.

I understood Derek rather in the sense that "creating a preference for a 
disputed feature shouldn't be used as an easy way out of a discussion". 
In that particular discussion, *you* are the first user who has been 
asking for changing gnucash's behaviour here. *All* of the developers 
obviously are happy with the behaviour as it is (cause otherwise one of 
them would've already brought up that issue -- for example, for me it is 
totally ok that if I manually enter a different date for reconciling I 
also manually enter the statement's balance). This means so far you are 
the only one who is asking for a change. If you want to see some change 
here, you would need to continue the discussion with convincing 
arguments, so that eventually you convince at least some more users 
and/or developers to see the need for a different behaviour -- which 
then might be implemented as a preference. A preference would then be 
added because we got convinced it is what users ask for. But we will not 
simply add preferences to easily get out of any controversial discussion 
-- that was the whole point.

Christian