Re: Dangerous "feature?"

On Thursday 19 February 2009, Bobby wrote:
> On Thursday 19 February 2009 04:42:19 Andras Mantia wrote:
> > On Thursday 19 February 2009, Simon Dawson wrote:
> > > My normal behaviour  is that I get two dialogue boxes appear. The
> > > first is 'Are yousue you want toremove from project?' and the
> > > next is 'Do you want to remove the files from the server as
> > > well?' so I'm not really sure why yours is not asking the second
> > > question.
> >
> > That's the default behavior. He probably checked once the "Do not
> > ask again" checkbox in the dialog. I'm sorry to say, but this was a
> > user error...
>
> I'm sorry but that simply does not fly. A professional designer has
> as much responsibility for not taking into account worst possible
> oversight by the user. That might not be easy... Where do you draw
> the line?

Sorry, you probably misunderstood you. The DEFAULT behavior is to ASK 
the user if he wants to remove the file from the disk and from the 
servers (two separate questions).  If the user chose YES and ticket the 
"Don't ask me again" checkbox, from then on it is his responsibility to 
know that removing a file will remove from the server as well. The same 
way clicking on NO and the checkbox never removes the files from the 
server. This kind of message boxes are pretty much standard in KDE.
And the two checkboxes (remove from disk, remove from server) are 
independent, if they aren't that would be a bug.

> There probably needs to be color and sound to make sure you are
> really there paying attention to what is about to happen. Or, the
> function of deleting files are placed somewhere else and cannot be
> done at the same time as removing it from the program.

This was a convenience feature, requested by the users. Obviosuly you 
can't make a program that fits everybody. I think the default behavior is 
safe enough and it is customizable enough to please most of the users. 
Unfortunately you cannot make an application that is user proof. No 
matter how many times you ask "do you really want it?", a tired user 
could still press Yes many times without actually reading the message. 
That's the behavior troians and viruses uses most of the time these 
days: they hope the useer makes a mistake.

> Anther option would be to always keep backup files which are not
> removed with the campaign. 
The professional solution is to use a version management system. Quanta 
itself shouldn't do everything, IMO. It creates backups for files modified 
inside, it even has a crash recovery mechanism for those files. But if 
the user deletes a file that e.g never was edited, why keep a backup of 
it by Quanta? 

> Quanta is a tool. The more it can do for us the better it is.

Yes, but it is the best to use together with other tools. ;) 

Andras