Re: [Gnumed-devel] Re: [Gnumed-bugs] Measurements plugin display uninformative when no measurements exist

[Jim Busser]

On 2010-02-04, at 1:04 PM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> Imagine a status line message provoking us to go check something in another 
> plugin...

Imagine me possessing sufficient short term memory that -- if I would read (and 
respond) to a status message, and accordingly switch to the plugin about which 
the message relates -- I should no longer need that reminder to be kept.

While you might argue a user could have changed to some alternate plugin 
without having taken notice of the status message, my reply would be that -- if 
this hoped-to-be-useful message can anyway be overwritten (say the user checked 
for updates), the argument to not clear it weakens.

My understanding would be that the status message is intended to give an 
immediate response to an attempted process and that immediacy loses relevance 
as the user continues to do other things. It is not as if the status message 
jumps up and down until it is attended to. For lack of a datetime stamp within 
the status message, the user risks having no idea how long it has been there. 
If it risks being kept in any circumstance where it could be misinterpreted, 
then it should be consistently cleared. if it has relevance, it should "come 
back" as the user would again attempt the thing that causes the status message 
to appear. For all we know, the thing that caused the status message might in 
the meantime be cleared by the user without even noticing the 
hoped-to-be-helful status message.