[vlc-devel] Re: RFC: refurbishing the configuration manager

[Samuel Hocevar]

On Sat, Oct 12, 2002, Gildas Bazin wrote:

> The BIG difference here is that the user is in _control_ when he installs 
> (uninstalls) a new plugin or use the --plugin-path so he expects that the 
> preferences panel will change as well as the configuration options he's 
> able to save.
> 
> But what you are proposing is to take this control from the user and to 
> randomly change (at run-time) what he is able to save as config options.
> Honestly this isn't what I call a user friendly behaviour.

   Why do you absolutely want to see randomness here? These configuration
options changes can be triggered by the user as well. Of course if some
evil programmer wants to hose things and add random changes here and
there there is no way we can prevent it, but even now we cannot prevent
a badly coded part of vlc from unloading modules at random. We just need
to discipline ourselves and remember that the user exists.

> Unless the module does this kind of probing at initialization time, then 
> there's no way you can save the config vars.
> As I said, it's not a technical problem, but a user-friendlyness problem. 
> You cannot present the user with a preferences panel which will change (add 
> new entries, remove existing entries, etc...) itself _randomly_ at 
> run-time.

   Again, it won't be random. If the user clicks on "detect soundcards"
she'll be expecting something to change in the preferences panel. I'd
even expect her to be lost if nothing has changed.

> I think that when you will understand that, we'll be able to come to an 
> agreement ;)

   Don't worry, I won't insist for long.. it's not that a big deal to
me, but I'm really curious why you keep talking about randomness. All
the examples I gave were user-triggered :)

-- 
Sam.
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