Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Release early, release often? - What about a new release?

From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:59:51 +0200
Jacques, Olivier (OpenCall Test Infra) wrote:
I don't see that as a pre-requisite. IMHO we should keep things simple
and have only a mention in the release notes that Ethereal preferences
are not retrieved.

That's not a very user friendly point of view.

"Why should I take care of the preference settings, I was able to copy things over so others can do this as well"

You're showing a point of view that I hate by a lot of open source projects (especially the wiki implementations I had a look at). I personally don't want to spend my whole life with all the programs I use to tinker settings after upgrading until it's working again. It should just update and work again as before.

The most successful open source projects *are* taking care of such things, and IMHO, they are often successful because of exactly these reasons ...

However, a lot of open source developers seem to think that keeping things simple for the developers is more important than keeping things simple for the users. I'm personally disgusted about this point of view, even for a project biased towards "power users".

Regards, ULFL


P.S: BTW, that's one of the main reasons that I still use Windows: Windows developers take care of their users while UNIX developers often don't (this seems to be a pattern). However, I want to switch to Linux for other reasons I don't like of Windows (privacy, DRM, ...).