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Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork
paleshadows writes "Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol
instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and
very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of
version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has
been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much
is typed. It turns out that this feature, along with the uncompromising
unwillingness of the developers to provide an option to turn it off,
annoys the bejesus of very many users.
One
comment made by a Professor that teaches "Collaboration in an Open
Source World" argued that 'It's easy to see why open source developers could develop dogmas. [...]
The most dangerous dogma is the one exhibited
here: the God feature. "One technological solution can meet
every possible user-desired variation of a feature." [...]
You [the developers] are ignoring the fan base with a dedication to your convictions
that is alarmingly evident to even the most unobservant of followers,
and as such, you are demonstrating that you no longer deserve to be in
the position of servicing the needs of your user base.'" Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous?
When you want good usability you have to throw stuff away, completly. Moving the option around doesn't help, because you end up with more code to maintain, side-effects that might break other stuff and a lot of problem. With one option that might not be to hard to solve, but if you have dozens of options interacting with each other it gets trouble some.
All that said, I havn't read the discussion (trac is down) so I don't know if there really is a good use case for having a manually resizable inputbox or if it is just users wanting back the behavior they got used to.
"It's a basic choice for a project developer to do one thing well or provide many options where some or all do not work quite as well."
This is a false dilemma. What works well for one person may not work well for another. From a user's perspective, two good options can be better than one good but limited option.