Re: Warning about experimental GUI

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 11/27/2013 03:33 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 11/27/2013 02:51 AM, Torsten wrote:
> > Do we really have to show the warning about the experimental GUI in such
> > a prominent way? Can we at least make the widget closable?
>
> I figured someone wouldn't like it.
>
> I think the question is what are we trying to tell users? Is it "expect
> bugs and if you find them we don't want to hear your complaints" or
> "expect bugs, please be nice when you report them" or "we don't really
> think the GUI is ready, but here it is anyway" or what?

That is the question I was wondering when I proposed using "beta" in the 
language and explaining not wanting bug reports about GUI behavior 
because the bug likely has already be found.


> FWIW, I'm OK with releasing Octave with the GUI enabled now and just
> being prepared for complaints and nasty comments and trying to fix the
> worst problems for the next point release.

I'm wondering about the stability and options.  If we can get most 
platforms in good shape with no more changes to the stable branch then 
an all-gui release would be fine even if there are quirks.  It's just 
that some of the latest comments about all the compile problems and 
Apple systems having little success is troublesome.  I'm wondering 
though if the pending release just caused folks to quickly get all 
platforms working.

Is automatically launching a GUI in Windows a requirement regardless of 
how buggy the GUI is?  Are there Windows users running from the DOS shell?


>  But nearly everyone else
> seems to think that we should disable the GUI for 3.8. If we disable it
> but include it, then I think we should explain to people why we've done
> that. Putting that explanation in the release notes guarantees that few
> people will see it. Putting it in a pop-up dialog when Octave starts
> would probably not be much better if the note is only displayed once.
> Displaying it every time would be more annoying to me than the banner
> that I added.

There is another alternative.  Rather than just displaying the 
beta-release message once and never again, a time stamp can be put into 
the settings on exit for the last time the user ran Octave GUI.  If a 
couple of weeks has gone by before the user starts Octave GUI again, 
then pop up the beta-release message.  My thinking is that if the user 
is running Octave GUI on a daily basis then he or she is fairly content 
with the experimental release and doesn't need to be reminded about the 
caveats.

Anyway, any warning message should contain at least these elements:

1) Note about it being experimental and an official 4.0 release coming.
2) A short roadmap of the time frame for a very stable release.
3) A short description of how to launch Octave without the GUI and go 
back to the legacy version.

Now, as for bug reports, maybe the best thing to do is to temporarily 
modify the way "Report Bug" in the help menu behaves for this release. 
Rather than go directly to the page describing how to report bugs, put 
up a dialog box reiterating that this is a beta release and that GUI 
bugs are a priority so their bug may have already been reported.  At the 
end of the message in the dialog box, there is where the link to the 
webpage should go.  After this release, we can extract that intermediate 
dialog box, go back to current behavior, and move on.

Dan