[mythtv-users] New blue-abstract theme 1.8

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Mon Sep 24 13:42:29 UTC 2012


On 09/20/2012 12:59 AM, Michael Watson wrote:
> On 20/09/2012 10:49 AM, Chris Pinkham wrote:
>> * On Wed Sep 19, 2012 at 07:26:54PM -0400, George Nassas wrote:
>>> Two people here say the opposite. These sort of junky features really
>>> need to be globally disableable through frontend settings IMHO.
>> We want to get away from having a setting for every little feature 
>> like this.
>> Some might like scrolling but not some other feature.
> Why so, whats wrong with lots of configurable content.  IMO, the more 
> configuration options the better.   Dont necessarily need a gui 
> interface for every option, just some documentation on the wiki.
> Look at Windows for instance, there are 1000's of configurable option 
> via the registry.

Because probably a good percentage (>50%...  possibly much higher) of 
the bugs reported to us are due to or obscured by user-specified 
settings that make their copy of MythTV work differently from 
normal/differently from the developers who are trying (and, often, 
failing) to reproduce the issue so they can fix it.  Unfortunately, 
users don't generally understand the options, anyway***, and often flip 
switches because they sound "good," and end up breaking things****.  I 
could give you links to hundreds of threads where a user complains that 
something doesn't work in MythTV only to later find out that they 
flipped a switch that they didn't remember flipping, which disabled 
whatever feature they now wanted to use.

Besides, when it comes to themable options, you /already/ have a setting 
for every single feature--the theme itself provides the settings.  
Removing these "coarse-grained" settings actually gives the power user 
/more/ control over things by allowing them to apply exactly the 
functionality desired at every location in MythTV.

Mike


*** If we add a setting for specifying the time for a short/medium/long 
OSD timeout value, which one do you change to modify the time that the 
info window appears on screen?  OK, after a lot of trial and 
error--involving going to frontend settings and navigating to the OSD 
timeout section, then changing one value, then going to playback and 
hitting INFO, then counting to see how long it lasts, then repeating 
until you've found the right one (but you don't mind because you're a 
power user)--and then you think you've "fixed" it.  Later, though, you 
realize that the volume slider stays up for 25s, too, and you curse 
MythTV for not allowing you to have a separate setting for that window 
(short/medium/long/volume/...).  Instead, the proper solution is to 
allow specifying a timeout for every individual window--which is what we 
will do, via the theme itself.  Similarly, while you say you should be 
able to disable the scrolling with a single switch, you may find that 
scrolling is very important in some parts of the theme, but actually 
gets in the way in others.  So, again, you need to control it at a finer 
level--at the theme.  Therefore, the approach we're taking gives you 
/more/ control than "just add a setting for it."


**** Like all the users who enabled libmpeg2 decoding and then filed 
bugs when captions failed to work, in spite of the warning that the 
libmpeg2 decoder is experimental (and, eventually, the explicit mention 
that it would prevent subtitles/captions from working).


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list