[development] Have you ever laughed fate in the face?

[Alan Dixon]

"taking away freedom" sounds more like a political soundbite (no, no
one in particular ...) than a useful argument - i think it'd be more
constructive to be specific. Here's my two specifics:

1. as an example - my experience with Mailman is that it has too many
choices about configuring lists - not only are the choices hard to
understand, some combinations should never be chosen. I really like
sympa, as an alternative, where you can choose the type of list you
want, and then you can fiddle with the details if you understand them.
In this case - the equivalent would be that you would choose a
'workflow' level of abstraction when setting up, but could modify the
details if you knew how to and needed to.

2. re: neil's question about why you might want to change it. When
someone (someone else of course!) just imported 200 nodes and goofed
something, and I have to manually delete them all, I want to turn off
the trashbin and (maybe) the confirm. Of course, there will always be
better tools to accomplish this, but I suspect this kind of thing
happens a lot in real life. In fact, anytime there are automated
publishing mechanisms (aggregator2 springs to mind as well), then
there will be times when you want to skip the workflow to fix errors.

Conclusions:

1. From a code point of view, I think the separate module(s) is a good idea.

2. From a usability perspective, I think an interface that offers
choices that are tailored to use-cases rather than to technical
details is essential. Having access to the technical choices is nice.

I don't think these two conclusions need to be contradictory.


-- 
Alan Dixon, Web Developer
http://alan.g.dixon.googlepages.com/