[Users] [Bulk] Re: Claws config needs much better documentation

[Michael Gmelin]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2012 06:58:39 +0530
Sitaram Chamarty <sitaramc at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 6:03 AM, Michael Gmelin <freebsd at grem.de>
> wrote:
> 
> > In general to me it's still more of a philosophical question - do
> > you want to make the software behave like other mail clients do by
> 
> If the devs don't want to make this change fine, but it should be for
> reasons specific to the feature, not "do you want to make the software
> behave like other mail clients do...".
> 

I think that Claws is better with this feature enabled. Therefore it
should be the default, so users learn about it. I'm not certain if you
actually think that this is a useful feature at all or not, your
argument was that it might surprise users in a bad way - while I think
having to move mail once from Trash to Inbox is not a big deal and I
got surprised in a good way.  I also think that this feature could be
improved, but not by disabling it by default (and it seems like it
used to be implemented differenly, which makes a lot of sense).

Brief overview of the debate:

1. Is the feature useful to a significant number of users?
   I think "yes", you think ?

2. Is it a bad surprise or even dangerous?
   I think "no", you think "yes"

3. Should features be disabled by default to make migration easier for
users
   We both think "if it's a bad surprise", but we seem to have different
definitions of what "bad" means - to me this is an inconvenience for a
migrating user and I don't think a program should sacrifice its default
feature set to avoid inconvenience for new users.

This *is* specific to this feature - if the feature in question
was that claws by default erased your HOME directory on invalid password
entry I would strongly suggest to not make this the default.

At the same time the general question of where you draw the line
between inconvenience, bad surprise and dangerous is also part of this
discussion. It's different for every project and depends on the project
goals, target audience, if/who you want to compete with, etc.

I guess we can agree to disagree :)


[removed comments, I'm sorry if the discussion seemed like a waste of
your time]

-- 
Michael Gmelin